To All Ends
by Cacotechny
Summary: Loki faces the consequences of his far-reaching crimes at the will of the All-Father. The result leaves him stranded and open in possibly the worst location Odin could have dreamt of. Will the punishment hit its mark or will it fuel the God of Lies to seek further vengeance? ..Hiatus-ish..
1. The Sentence

Silent, like a fleeting and black shadow, he could be. His movements could be things of subtlety, quiet and clandestine when needs be. Generally a muttered word in a tongue long lost to the nine realms would suffice, or the snap of his fingers. He would kill in such a manner – silent, never seen, like an assassin. In all, he had ever been much too quiet for the hard-headed tastes of the Aesir.

But he could make the flagstones ring beneath his boots if he wanted. He could pull the banners from the walls, shatter the windows, crack the throne. He had caused a great deal of noise on Midgard, much more than his stint as king of Asgard. Oh, he could make sound if he wanted.

Not so much anymore. Even gods must need a rest now and again. And he hadn't seen the inside of his eyelids in what felt like a millennia. The scepter had been a boon, a crutch, a supplement to keep him going long after the rest of him had worn out. With that gone, he felt like a broken civ, contents spilled out on the floor and useless to anyone. The sound of his boot heels ringing off the walls seemed muffled through the fog of fatigue weighing on his eyelids.

Regardless, he was still a god. He strode tall and purposefully, shoulders back, and head held high. He looked beyond the guards flanking him and was unconscious to the light jingle of his chains. He knew not shame. This Asgardian court, the one belonging to his once-father, really held little sway over him. He had never been of their kind; he did not fear the All-Father's wrath.

Or at least that was what he told himself. The claws of adolescent fear tried to worm their way into the back of his mind, right next to the image of the one who had given him the scepter in the first place.

Ah.

Now that was something he would…anticipate, not with any excitement, of course. The Other had promised vengeance if he failed and would be able to seek any hole or crevasse in which he may hide.

But that little gee-whiz factor had depended on them possessing the Tesseract, which was now some meters away, in the All-Father's vault. Its power had created goosepimples over the skin of his arms. He had never given away any of his important secrets, his ways to and from the realms of the universe, but he did wonder if Thanos and his Chitauri minions had anything else up their sleeves.

Well. Time would tell. Being the inherent trickster he was, Loki did not doubt their ability. Undisciplined, yes, but there were those who showed promise beyond the typical blood-thirsty, chaos-driven alien. It made him almost thankful that Odin ordered him locked away into one of the more secure parts of the dungeon. The spell-shielded ones, the ones that imprisoned both outside and in. At least they had taken off that damnable muzzle.

Lost in his thoughts, Loki nearly missed the hallway opening up into the throne room. Oh yes. His mind descended from on high back into his body. He winced slightly at the rough hands of his guards as they shoved him towards his place, the circular standing point of justice before the throne of Odin. Had he been weaker, they might have forced him to his knees.

The Liesmith, the God of Chaos, kneels to no one.

The All-Father himself stood before his lofty throne, staff in hand, winged helmet adorning his head, and his one blue eye stared down at the relatively battered and scarred once-son standing before him on the dial. Loki's green ones met that pointed stare, but only just.

Near the stairs and to the side stood the real Odinson, who looked oddly out of place and uncomfortable. Other than that, the great room was decidedly void of others.

"What, no audience?" Loki resisted the urge to flinch when Odin brought the bottom of his staff to bear against the marble floor, forcibly dismissing his glib comment. Odin's voice snapped through the silent air.

"This being who stands before me is not the man who fell from the Asbru bridge when the Bifrost was destroyed. This one is…"

Odin paused, his one eye sweeping over the roughened albeit tapered individual on trial. Loki felt his skin try to crawl; he wondered if it would be appropriate to remove his Asgardian features. It would certainly reinforce his identity. Odin continued.

"This one is something different entirely. Something darker, though I am reminded that he is a prince and citizen of Asgard, under our protection and judgment."

Loki's teeth bared themselves in something of a feral grin, leering past the words of pleasantry. No, that was disappointment in Odin's voice. Weariness at the unwelcome behavior of his once-son. "Am I a prince or am I merely a thing?" His voice, while low, hummed through the room, chilling the air. "I find the latter to be terribly more appropriate, given my nature."

Odin's brow remained dreadfully unperturbed. Loki continued.

"I am curious, though. Are you saying this just for my benefit or for the benefit of hearing your own justifications for what may happen here?"

The All-Father waited a patient beat. Damn him. Odin was being frustratingly reserved. Apparently Loki's jibes were much less effective than the stupid insults that might pour from Thor's mouth. Loki smirked, emitting a humorous snort. "Do forgive me. My tongue seems to have lost its leash in my time away."

"Loki, you stand before me a criminal of the nine realms and those beyond. You openly attacked the peaceful realm of Midgard with aims to enslave them."

Oh, was that what he was doing?

"You have murdered in the name of Asgard against my wishes and intent and in the name of your own selfish desires and vengeance."

Something like that. Maybe he hadn't been entirely successful against the "Avengers," as Anthony Stark had dubbed them, but he did succeed in causing enough chaos and confusion amongst them to keep things troubled for some time. The swath of destruction in New York would be a hard stain to remove, too.

"Have you anything to say?"

Loki, mouth drawn up in a slim, wry smile that crinkled the skin around his eyes, glanced ostentatiously to his left and right. "What can I say?" he asked innocently, shrugging. "Guilty as charged, I'm afraid."

There really wasn't much point in trying to beg for freedom or feign innocence or asking for mercy. Freedom would only expose him to the Chitauri. He could easily claim to have been under some Chitauri spell, fabricate that he was merely a puppet in the hands of a stronger being; that was ridiculous, though. And mercy? He had seen with his own eyes the All-Father's particular brand of mercy, and it was something he did not want. He would rather spend some time in a cell on Asgard recuperating and taking a few years to unravel the spells around it than otherwise. They were admittedly made of rather potent magic.

Yet again, Odin proved to be unflappable. "Very well. That makes this process much speedier."

Loki's head reeled. The possibilities were endless; he certainly wasn't guaranteed imprisonment. Banishment was a potential punishment, but he knew that Odin knew that it wouldn't serve for long. He would eventually find a way out. The stripping of his powers? That wouldn't be unprecedented, but he wasn't sure how effective that sort of thing was against a Frost Giant. Perhaps a combination? Who knew. Odin could be terribly cruel, as was the nature of divine beings.

Was Odin divine? He was certainly powerful, yes, but he had weakness. Just like the rest of them. Something to ponder on later, perhaps.

Loki's idiotic, sentimental brother stepped in suddenly, interrupting the play of ideas running through his head.

Thor had seen better days. Clearly the whole business troubled him to no end – his armor, Mjolnir, cape, everything was more or less as splendid and princely as it usually was. It was the lines in his face, the grey of his eyes and the dark circles beneath them that gave it away. Loki really looked no better; the Hulk's tender …ministrations had been quite painful, even for him. But at least he managed to keep something of a fire in his gaze. Or ice, rather. Yes, that was more appropriate.

"Father, before you pass judgment, I would ask that you not forget that the accused is my brother and your son."

Now that was surprising. Or maybe not. Thor standing up again for his little brother. Loki's eyes narrowed, and he was caught somewhere between loathing and bewilderment. Sentiment. Compassion. Odin was barely capable of such things. Loki was far beyond them.

"You're a fool, Odinson."

Thor glanced over his shoulder at Loki, but turned back again to face Odin. "Regardless," he began, "I would see him treated as a son of Asgard."

"The All-Father is in the process of administering his _justice_, Thor. Kindly step aside so that he may continue," Loki spat. "I highly doubt your pleadings will change anything."

"You are my brother, Loki-!"

"Enough of this."

Odin's voice washed over them like a wave. Loki's gaze traveled lazily back up the golden figure at the throne. The one eye was narrowed, though Loki could not tell if it was in anger or something else. Maybe it was the fatigue or maybe he was going mad, but something inside him wanted to laugh. It bubbled in his chest and he had to fight against it rolling out. Why was he fighting it?

He wasn't entirely sure. By the roots of the tree, he needed some sleep. Let Odin make his punishment; he didn't even care anymore. He supposed that the sweeping, golden spires of Asgard should have been a sight for sore eyes. But it wasn't home anymore. It never would be, he imagined. Why Thor was so intent on making it so was beyond him. Looking up once more, he realized Odin had descended from his throne to push Thor aside and stand directly before Loki.

They could see eye to eye, the All-Father and the Trickster. Most likely where Thor got his impressive stature from. Some dark demon took hold of Loki's tongue. "You look tired, All-Father," he crooned, eyes crinkling in a smile that didn't quite translate through his mouth.

Odin surprised him by placing a large hand on his shoulder. "Loki, you are indeed far afield. I will never forget your place as my son before all else."

For the first time since …well, in rather a long time actually, Loki's over-active mind paused to take this in. There was a caveat coming, he could see it from eons away, but this talk was dredging up old, unbidden memories from where the fear in the back of his mind huddled like a forgotten child. In the debilitating wake of his body wanting to shut down, his mental defense must have begun to retreat.

"However, I cannot allow such crimes to go unpunished."

"Now there's the father I so dearly remember…I was beginning to think you'd grown soft." Loki's eyes flicked towards Thor, who frowned.

"Father…" Thor's voice hovered over Odin's shoulder.

"Death be not fitting, nor imprisonment."

"Banishment, then?"

"It did set your brother – " Loki gritted his teeth. "-to rights. I think that time amongst your would-be subjects, taken down to their level with their weaknesses and their wants and needs…that may be most fitting."

Loki laughed, a barking, strained laugh that sounded almost as painful as it was. "You realize that you send me off to my own death should you strand me on Earth, yes? The entire realm knows my face. Not only would Thor's precious SHIELD see me to an end, my former allies must also be out for my head after such a spectacular failure."

Finally, _finally_, Odin's brow tightened and his mouth formed a hard and resolute line. "The consequences do not escape me. What befalls you with this sentencing belongs to you and your actions."

Behind him, Thor's startled gaze lay not on Odin but on Loki. "Father, this won't help!"

"What, brother? Afraid that a little taste of my own medicine might 'send me over the edge?' Bah!" Thor seemed chastened enough by the sudden wrinkling of the skin between his eyebrows. Loki, letting his eyes linger on the thunder god, held out his chained wrists to his once-father. "By all means, do the honors, _sire_."

The chains fell off with a wave of Odin's hand. Loki's armor shattered beneath the All-Father's fingers. What little spark of magic that had been working at the slipped disk in his spine was snuffed out, leaving him breathless and dizzy. Something in the destruction sent a wave of adrenaline through his mind. The giddiness returned and this time he did not stop it.

Through the light-headedness and euphoria and the blue glow of the Tesseract now gleaming and sparking in Odin's hand, Loki laughed. He saw Thor look away. No doubt the prodigal son was having unpleasant flashbacks of his own banishment. Before the portal opened, Loki's eyes met Odin's one for the last time. There was something there, in that icy blue orb, but Loki could barely keep himself up much less try and read his once-father's expression.

The echoes of his laugh stayed in the throne room long after he had been thrust into the whirling oblivion of the between-worlds.

...

AN: H'ok, I've been reading fantastic _Avengers_ fanfiction recently, which inspired me to get out the 'ol muse and write. The little plots I've been perusing have more or less been covered, though. Regardless, here's some creative outlet. Loki's a bit scattered and crazy and maybe OOC, Thor's kind of a push-over, and I'm terrible at dialogue between them and Odin, but hope you enjoyed. I suppose it's intended to be continued but constructive criticism is most welcome.


	2. The Descent

The world presented itself by degrees in shades of grey and black. A white glare overhead met the harsh corners of the walls around him, casting shadows long and deep. The scattered breaks in his vision turned out not to be physiological, but mere rain. Slowly he became aware of his physical self, lying in a puddle on the ground.

The first breath he took was a mixture of pain and relief. The movement nudged the injury in his back; the oxygen spread through his limbs like a calming shroud. At least the rain was cool. It made a disorienting contrast with the dissipating heat of the pavement against his back. Pavement.

Right.

Midgard. Earth.

Like a pale automaton, he sat up to take in the surroundings. The walls were those of buildings. The glare overhead was a flickering street lamp. Early evening was giving way to night in the fading glow of the clouds overhead. He sat in a puddle in tattered black tunic, pants, and boots in an alleyway. A dumpster loomed in the gloom to his left, a pile of trash and a rotting crate huddled next to it.

As his brain stumbled its way back to the semblance of working capacity, his temper began to rise. Odin had actually done it, had stranded him on a hostile planet with no protection against the local populace or whatever may come from beyond.

Prince of Asgard? Son of Odin? Folly. What son of Odin would be subject such conditions? What prince would be treated in such a manner? What son…?

Loki staggered to his feet. Probably a mistake, this, as his vision swam alarmingly, but rise he did. The blood in his face drained to his toes, but he stayed upright. The mortal body he had been cursed with cried for rest. He cast a baleful eye on the dripping clouds above him, breathing heavily. A leer revealed his teeth, and he shook a fist at the sky.

"You old fool! Your silly punishment will see me dead before you ever have the pleasure of seeing it work."

As much as his penchant for the dramatic would prefer a stirring monologue, his body had decided that it had had enough. The wobbling in his knees was the only warning before he found himself sitting once more in the puddle, hands resting in the grimy water and world trying to spin itself off its axis across his eyes.

Loki swore. Something like fear, he wasn't entirely sure, was fighting with the fatigue to get him back to his feet. An image of Chitauri assassins falling upon him like hounds upon a cornered fox lodged itself in the forefront of his mind. Swearing still, he rolled onto his knees and once more fought to his feet. With no magic, he could not shield himself. Heimdall wouldn't even have to squint now to find him.

He had limped his way down the alley and was nearing the busy street on the other side when a snapping sound came from behind him, followed by a brief wind that blew his wet hair into his face. The narrow alleyway disappeared into another scene entirely, an otherworldly view of the glittering expanse of space. A shudder escaped from his frame – magic. Even powerless he could feel it tingling in his fingers.

"Loki Laufeyson," a voice behind him said. Loki turned slowly around.

"I am the son of no one," he replied, aiming a chilly glare at the shrouded being standing in the shadow of a rocky dial. "Or have you forgotten?"

Bravado. Sheer bravado.

The Other had found him.

If Chitauri laughed, Loki decided that he would not enjoy hearing it, and thankfully the Other did not provide fodder for his nightmares. Amusement, though, seemed to wrinkle the sharp-toothed hole that was the alien's mouth as it stepped evenly towards Loki.

"You've failed him, Asgardian. I warned you of the consequences."

"That you did, but I do happen to be in a bit of a situation at the moment. I beg the Titan's indulgence to allow me some time before his ever-so justifiable wrath falls upon my poor head."

Even from thousands of leagues away the Other's presence rippled the atmosphere with disapproval. It sent a wave of uneasiness through Loki's toes. He had two options: fight or flight. Fighting was out of the question. Flight would be just as difficult. He swore inwardly.

"Your silver tongue still wags, but in futility."

The Other was now nose to nose with him, more or less. Loki blinked rapidly to keep the wavering image clear and the wobbling in his knees to a minimum. "You have lied to us. You have failed us. You must face justice."

"Justice?" Loki laughed. A day of supremely disappointed authoritative figures continually unruffled by Loki's words, this. Not a good day.

The Other shook its head. "Your impudence is insulting." Its large and disjointed fingers shot up to plant their tips on Loki's forehead. It was like being slapped with a shield.

Loki staggered backwards out of the illusion, tripping and falling once more. When he lifted his head, the illusion had vanished. The contents of the revelation were much less disturbing than what it left behind.

A Chitauri stood at the ready in the center of the alley, a set of curved and wicked-looking knives at its waist and one of their energy rifles in its hand. The Other's voice ricocheted inside Loki's head.

"When your _glorious conquest_ began to fail, this one was ordered to stay behind."

"Scouting out the competition?"

"Meet your executioner, Son of No One."

A surge of adrenaline barely managed to get Loki scrambling away before a ball of lethal energy shattered the asphalt where he had been sitting. As he lurched to his feet, a knife edged in red whizzed by his ear and sank into the iron shell of a dumpster. Thankfully his decreased motor skills seemed to help him evade as he teetered to the right to put a stack of boxes between him and any projectiles.

The noise of cars and people walking by was only so many steps away. Another knife flew by overhead as he ducked instinctively, arms shielding his face. He could hear the heavy steps of the Chitauri behind him. Would the alien risk showing itself to the humans? Were it Loki holding the weapons, he would not particularly care, but after such an overwhelming defeat, he wondered if the Other would consider exposing its one assassin to the denizens of Earth.

As it turned out, he was lucky. Loki shot out from the alley and straight across the busy street without realizing it. Only angry voices and the blaring of horns followed him. He managed to dodge most of the cars until he clipped one with a hip in the opposite lane. From his vantage point on the ground, he spotted a yellow vehicle stopped on the far side of the road. A lit sign on the top of it read 'vacant.'

Scrambling back to his feet, he tripped over to the car, yanked open the door, and clambered in just as somebody else was getting in on the opposite side.

"Hey, buddy, this car's occupied!"

He looked up, breathing heavily, at the burly driver jerking a thumb over his shoulder. There was indeed somebody sitting in the back seat next to him – an elegant-looking woman with red hair pulled back into a formal bun. She watched him, eyebrows high, with a mildly surprised look on her face. Loki's eyes darted between the two humans a moment before he recovered his voice.

"My apologies." He cleared his throat. "I've had a devil of time finding one of these tonight, particularly after the loss of my umbrella." He shot a furtive glance once more at the woman. "By all means, please address the lady's destination. I don't mind waiting."

The driver eyed him, noting no doubt his odd clothes, accent, and the fact that he was dripping from the rain. "It's your call, Miss Potts," he said, looking at the woman.

Pepper Potts. Loki kept his expression neutral, turning his gaze on the woman, as well. Pepper Potts, the Iron Man's associate. Thankfully he had had the foresight to pump Agent Barton for information on the Avengers and their respective connections. After choosing Stark Tower for the place of the portal, he had done significant amounts of research on the structure. Miss Potts's name had been listed as a contributor.

"I would be entirely in your debt," he said slowly, smiling hopefully. It proved contagious; Pepper's smile was lovely.

"It doesn't seem like you're from around here, so I don't mind at all," she replied evenly. "Stark Tower, please."

"You got it," the driver said skeptically, mumbling to himself as he put the car in drive.

The first few moments of the drive were silent. Loki looked at his hands, digging some dirt out from under one of his fingernails. What fortuitous circumstance be this? The Chitauri had forced him into a vehicle that would be taking him straight to Stark Tower. Had he struggled his way out on his own with no extrinsic motivation other than not liking alleyways, he might have missed the taxi entirely. And Pepper seemed blessedly ignorant of who he was. Maybe in such a state he was more or less hard to recognize. Well, at least to the average citizen.

"I really must thank you, Miss Potts, for allowing me to share the ride," he found himself saying. "It's been a…long night."

"It's no trouble," she replied, folding her slim hands over the black portfolio on her lap. "It certainly looks like you've had a tough time."

Loki chuckled. "An understatement, perhaps."

Pepper did have a lovely smile, easily identifiable as genuine. "If you don't mind me asking…" Her voice faded as her smile did. Loki's heart skipped a beat. "Oh my goodness, you're bleeding!" she declared, putting a hand on his shoulder, eyes on the seatback.

"Bleeding…?" He craned to look where she pointed and did indeed find that the seatback behind his shoulder was red. "Oh, damn. Look at that." That semi-hysterical laugh escaped out of his mouth for a moment before he smothered it. The Chitauri must have landed a hit with one of the knives, only to have dislodged when Loki ran into that other vehicle.

The driver's eyes reflected back at them in the rearview mirror. "Whoa, jeez! You're screwin' up my seats! You want I should go to a hospital or somethin'?"

Loki waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, it's not a problem," he began, wondering why he hadn't noticed it. What was that human condition? Shock? Maybe that was it. "It doesn't look so bad."

"We have a medical bay at Stark Tower," Pepper suggested. "It's closer than the local hospital, and you wouldn't have to worry about waiting."

"Miss Potts, I couldn't ask you to do that."

"You're not asking. I'm offering."

Loki smiled again. "You're much too kind." A night of misfortune into one of opportunity. Stark Tower was likely rife with research materials. The Foster Theory was one he was particularly interested in, and Stark no doubt had his fingers in that information like he did with nearly everything regarding S.H.I.E.L.D. and Thor.

Pepper's face was a mask of incredulity. "It's really the least I can do. I mean…" Her eyes darted back to the red stain on the seat. "What happened?" she breathed.

He forced a wry chuckle, running a hand through his wet and bedraggled hair to get it out of his face. "I'm not entirely sure…" Lies would last only until Stark saw him. If Stark saw him. "It happened rather fast. A mugging, I suppose."

Pepper tisked, taking her hand from his shoulder. "You'd think after what happened a few weeks back would have made an impression or something, but I guess New York will always be New York."

"You mean the attack?" he asked casually, leaning his elbow on the armrest. The adrenaline was beginning to wear off, he noticed, and a heaviness was settling over his eyelids. Pepper nodded much like people do when speaking of tragic events.

"Yeah."

After a beat of silence, she spoke again, extending a hand to him. "Pepper Potts, as you heard."

Loki looked from her hand to her face. Either he had lost his ability to read faces – unlikely – or Pepper Potts was one of the more genuine people he had encountered of late. Her posture indicated confidence and sincerity. Given her vocation, professionalism must come naturally for her, also indicated by the flawlessness of her garb and hair.

What a breath of fresh air. He did not have to expect wry comments or condescension or disrespect or suspicion or hate.

He took her hand with a wan smile, relaxing only just. "A pleasure, Miss Potts. I do believe I've heard of you."

She laughed; it was pleasant. "Many more people than I expected to have. And you?"

Without hesitation, Loki replied, "Donald Blake."

The drive to Stark Tower took longer than usual, as the massive reconstruction efforts of the city around the tower were still going on. Loki relished the murky glimpses he got of the destruction through the rain. The Leviathans were certainly good at what they did.

The taxi driver drove away a couple hundred dollars richer; Pepper insisted on paying for the reparation of the seat. She kept her hand in the crook of Loki's elbow as they approached the door, not failing to notice how he steadied himself on the taxi when they got out. Regardless, she chatted with him lightly, asking where he was from, what brought him to New York, but never giving up any information that was truly pertinent herself. She was a very careful woman, too, it seemed. The answers slipped off his tongue as easily as slitting throats – some nonsense about traveling from London, England in the pursuit of a job offer for a skilled accountant. He did know a little bit about Earth.

He held the umbrella as they walked up to the tower; Pepper was about five inches shorter than he was and bending to accommodate for it was painful. She paused at the door to swipe her security card through a scanner.

The reception area was deceptively neat; Loki had noticed the renovations going on in the upper levels of the tower. He hid his smirk. He also noticed that the large Stark logo had more or less been destroyed; only the A remained.

Pepper retrieved the umbrella from him, shaking the water off it onto the floor. Suddenly a disembodied voice echoed around them.

"Good evening, Miss Potts, I see you have a visitor."

"Evening, Jarvis," Pepper returned easily. Loki allowed himself to glance around in mild surprise.

"Cameras and a microphone?" he queried, turning an idle eye into the darkened corners of the room.

"No, Jarvis is a computer program," Pepper replied.

"Indeed," the clipped, English voice added. "I'll inform Mr. Stark that you've arrived."

"Have him meet me in the medical ward."

"Very good, ma'am."

"A computerized butler. How very appropriate for the likes of Tony Stark," Loki said as Pepper turned him towards two sliding metal doors that must lead to an elevator. He allowed her to lead; his head was beyond swimming at this point. And it looked like he would be encountering Stark, the Iron Man, again. His mouth curved upwards in an anticipatory smile.

...

**AN**: I've never had such a response, so many, many thanks to all the folks who added this to their alerts and favorites and my lovely reviewers. Get ready to tag along on something of a wild ride as I attempt to make a plot out of some midnight musings. As always, constructive criticism is welcome and encouraged!


	3. The Unwelcome Houseguest

"You seem quite practiced."

Loki could feel Pepper's eyes on the back of his head as she wiped at the knife wound. "Well… I tend to get a lot of opportunity to work on my first aid skills. I don't know if you happened to be paying attention to the news around the 2008 period?" Her tone was light, amused at her situation but not rueful.

"Ah, yes. The Iron Man." Having Pepper at his back allowed him a small, predatory smile. "I did happen to hear about that."

He felt incredibly exposed here – no armor, shirtless at the moment for the convenience of getting to his injury, and powerless to boot. Even in the depths – or lofts, he mused – of Stark's little tower, shadows drew his eye for a hostile form about to emerge and pitch a poisoned blade through his jugular. But, being able to sit in one place and not have to move was pleasant. The world tilted less, and without having to maintain a standing position or running, all he had to focus on was remaining upright.

His limbs still cried out for sleep, though. He could practically feel Pepper watching him for any sign of impending unconsciousness. She had been slightly alarmed, too, at the discoloration across his back and ribs from being slammed into a floor by the Hulk. "Boy, they really did a number on you," she murmured, reaching for an ice pack and a self-adhesive bandage.

"That they did," he replied levelly, an unbidden hint of malice creeping into his voice. The Avengers. Even thinking the name brought a bad taste to his mouth. Perhaps his recently acquired access to Tony Stark's tower could be used in a fitting form of revenge. Human technology was so easily tampered with; given the proper variables, he could bring down the entirety of Stark Tower himself. Actually, it wasn't a bad idea.

"Pepper, _what in God's_ name are you doing?"

The voice made Pepper jump. Loki's green eyes flicked up to the doorway. Standing there, in blue jeans and a red t-shirt and holding a tumbler of amber-colored liquid, was Tony Stark. And by the dangerous look in his eyes, he knew exactly who Loki was.

Pepper released a breath and finished applying medical tape to the gauze over Loki's wound. "He got mugged. He's not American, no insurance or anything, and we had the resources. I'm helping."

"You're helping a criminal is what you're doing," Stark said caustically. Loki chuckled.

"A pleasant greeting to you, as well, _Iron Man_," he said, steepling his fingers in front of him. Stark had frozen in the doorway in uncertainty, head tilted to one side and trying to determine if the threat sitting before him was really a threat. His hands hung at the ready at his sides as if he wore his armor, no doubt out of habit.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Please, make yourself at home," the man retorted. In his periphery, Loki saw Pepper look over her shoulder from the sink. She shut off the faucet and stood to the side, arms crossed. Her eyes went back and forth between Loki and Tony.

"I'm missing something," she said, voice low. She had picked up on Stark's uneasiness by the delicate frown creasing her forehead. These two were as much of a team as the Iron Man and his Avengers were. Something of note, perhaps.

"Oh no, Miss Potts. You didn't miss a thing. All of it was played out to your people over the television," Loki said.

Stark's mouth formed a wry line. "You were just tricked by the master, as it were," he said, setting the tumbler down. "Loki of Asgard." Loki's attention was on Stark, so he missed whatever reaction Pepper experienced. "What brings you back to Earth?" he asked, leaning casually against the counter. A show; Stark was nothing if not on edge. Loki's eyes tracked his movement. "I figured Papa Odin would keep you around to keep an eye on you." He paused, glancing towards the ceiling as a thought crossed his mind. "With just the one, though, I imagine that might be a bit difficult."

"You know nothing, Tony Stark." Loki straightened, feeling the tautness of the bandage on the back of his shoulder. "The All-Father actually deigned to imprison me here. And he happens to have a whole separate set of eyes that see everything, if you were unaware."

"I'm familiar with the myths, thanks. The untimely appearances of you and your brother prompted that little foray of knowledge."

"Myths…" Loki scoffed.

"Wait, wait, wait." Pepper stepped forward between them. "You're the Loki that led the attack. And _Thor_ is your brother?"

"Technically, he isn't-"

A sharp prick at his throat halted Loki's sentence. Stark had retrieved what looked like a scalpel and had done it rather fast. Apparently he wasn't as weak as he seemed without the armor. "Technically, you killed a close associate of ours in addition to attacking our planet and killing many others. Now, I'm curious as to the reason you're here. I'll give you the chance to explain before I introduce you to the business end of this little instrument."

"Oooh, the great Tony Stark, vanquishing an injured, powerless enemy with a scalpel."

"You expect me to believe the god of lies? You've cried wolf so many times, it should be a world record."

"Well, I certainly can't stop you." Loki tilted his head to allow Stark a better angle. "I could use the sleep anyway."

"Tony, wait."

Both men turned eyes on Pepper. She seemed disconcerted, either by her misplaced trust of Loki or by the sight of Tony holding a sharp weapon to somebody's throat with the intent to kill him. "Tony, these injuries aren't faked, and if he's supposed to be the 'master of magic' like you've told me, then they should have been healed a long time ago."

Loki hoped that his expression managed to arrange itself in something that looked appropriately humble. "If you must have an explanation, my punishment was to serve here, on Midgard, devoid of my power and weak like a human." He snorted humorously. "I'm also fleeing the Chitauri, more or less. Defeat does not become them, and I'm to bear the brunt of it."

"Granted, I wouldn't be too happy either," Stark admitted. "Be a waste of time."

Thankfully Pepper intervened before Loki acted upon the impulse to hit Stark in the nose.

"Tony, I think it's something that SHIELD needs to handle, particularly if Odin did put him here."

"I never much cared for politics. And it's not like Odin couldn't have sent a little heads up, like, hey kids, my psycho disgraced son is gonna be spending his detention with you guys, get a taste of his own medicine. Don't mind the crazy; he's adopted," Tony chided.

"You would do well to mind your tongue, human. I'm not in a glass cage this time." The vehemence in Loki's voice made Stark actually look at him. "You can't summon your armor, and I doubt your reflexes are quite fast enough to bleed me to death before I at the very least overpower you and snap your pretentious little neck."

The medical bay grew very quiet after that.

...

"Why is it when all the trouble finally settles down, I can have a peaceful meal and a good night's sleep without havin' to worry about some catastrophe, that I get a phone call from you, Stark?"

Nick Fury's dry, no nonsense tone quite matched the scowling one-eyed visage on the teleprompter. Stark leaned back in his desk chair, a half-pleasant smile on his face in spite of a rapidly swelling cut on the bridge of his nose. "Nick, you wound me, really," he said, fiddling with an ink pen. "And I thought you lived off catastrophe? It's the only time I ever see you." The S.H.I.E.L.D. director only scowled.

"This better be good."

"Better than good, actually. Great even." He gestured over his shoulder with the pen. "An old friend of ours is back."

Fury's eye squinted to see beyond Stark where Loki and Pepper lingered near the office door. The eyebrow above it arched alarmingly. Stark continued before Fury could speak. "I'm told Odin's planted this megalomaniac here on Earth to get a taste of his own medicine – no powers, no advanced healing, no blue magick-y scepter that turns people into order-following zombies." Stark scratched behind his ear with the pen. "Just a regular guy… who happens to have Earth as his prison."

"Just a regular guy… Stark, you're off your rocker. How the hell do I know he's not playing you or hasn't taken your brain hostage already? I'm supposed to believe that it was just God-given coincidence that he landed on _your_ doorstep?"

"Oh, I proved the whole lack of magic thing earlier," Stark replied easily, turning the pen over in his hands. "And yes." He clicked it a couple times. "I blame Pepper."

Indeed he had proved it, hence the replacement of mild amusement on Loki's face with a deep sulking scowl. Tony decided to double check on Loki's reduced state; he poked him with the scalpel. Not in the neck, fortunately, but the scalpel had been able to stand on its own in his bicep where Stark had left it. This resulted in Loki ramming the heel of his palm between Tony's eyes which nearly led into a full-fledged brawl before cooler heads prevailed.

Pepper sprayed them down with the fire extinguisher. Her reasoning – if Loki was still godlike in any way, the cut would have healed within a few minutes (it hadn't) and the palm strike would have sent Tony across the room (it didn't.) The knife wound went along with the story about the Chitauri finding him, and his inability to stand for long without swaying or blinking rapidly certainly did not label him as an intense threat.

Tony seemed to reluctantly accept this. Loki's acerbic commentary dried up under a layer of fire-retardant foam.

"We worked it out," Pepper added, making a face at the back of Stark's head. Loki sulked, perched on the edge of a low bookshelf with his arms crossed. He was not overly fond of Nick Fury's one eye fixated on him. Granted, it was Odin's opposite that Laufey put out with an ice spike, but the image brought back ill memories either way.

Fury blew a breath of air out through his nose. "This is a matter that I'll definitely have to sleep on. If I can." The latter was added with a touch of venom obviously aimed for Loki. Finally, Loki looked at the teleprompter screen, one lip curled derisively.

"A pleasure to keep you from sleep, Director Fury. My purpose in life has been fulfilled."

"Enemy Number One on my damn doorstep," the director muttered, shaking his head. "Keep him there, Stark, until I can get things organized. The last time we gave Mr. Laufeyson the hospitality of our premises, I lost _two_ bases of operations."

In spite of his ill temper, Loki turned an unbidden chuckle into a triumphant clearing of his throat. Fury was downplaying his accomplishments almost to a fault.

Stark shook his head. "Nuh-uh. The last time he was in this particular location, he nearly took over the planet using my arc reactor, some salvaged parts, and a shiny blue magic box. I'm not going to be responsible for this nutjob, and I do not want him around this tower."

"Gentlemen, I am still in the room."

Fury wouldn't have it. "You've got probably the most secure building in the state of New York. I'd rather Loki be there where at least your robot butler can lock him in than have him out running amok where I can't find him."

"It's not like I'm going to particularly enjoy it myself, you know," Loki added. Yes, it was opportunity. Yes, Stark's research and knowledge was at his fingertips once he figured out how to access it. However, he was quickly realizing that Tony Stark would not make the stay very pleasant. Loki had thrown him out a window, after all, and wrecked most of the place. And a number of other nefarious deeds.

Then again, it wasn't entirely necessary for Loki to leave the place standing, either.

"Your needs aren't worth the dirt on my boots," Fury replied. "You're lucky I don't have Stark hand you over right now."

"Oh, lucky that you don't 'hand me over' to your petty and trivial human justice system? I quake with mortal fear, Director."

Fury's scowl was nearly deeper than Loki's own. "Oh, you can bet your crazy ass it wouldn't be over to the US Justice System. It'd be a personal escort straight to SHIELD. Keep an eye on him, Stark. I don't care if you have to hog tie him and chain him to a tree. I'll get back to you when I can."

With that, the screen went dark. Stark pitched the ink pen across the desk. Loki fought back a weary yawn. His aches and pains had arrived in force and the dim lighting of the office was putting him to sleep. "If it's not one thing, it's another," Stark muttered before getting up out of his chair. "Come with me, Reindeer Games. Jarvis will find a nice, secure little cell…room…thing for you."

"Lovely." Out of the corner of his eye, Loki noticed Pepper watching him. She had seemed dreadfully out of sorts about being lied to and believing it. She avoided looking at him for the most part, but when she did, oh, only the ice of Jotünnheim running through Loki's veins could have been colder.

Stark, as well. If anything, at least Loki could get some pleasure out of ruffling the Iron Man's feathers and not having to worry about any physical consequences other than mere house arrest.

His upper arm was seized roughly as Stark forcibly pushed him out into the hallway. His lip curled angrily, but let the little man think he had control of the situation. Where they were bound, he didn't know and didn't particularly care. As long as there was a bed.

...

**AN:** You guys are fantastic. I haven't been this motivated to write in ages, hence why my profile has nothing else on it. I also apologize for the delay. Really wanted to make sure I was happy with this one before posting it, and I'm still a little iffy on if there was a better direction. Let me know what you think.

I'll stop rambling, now. 'Til next time!


	4. The Approaching Turn

Once Loki hit the bed, it was lights out. He would have enjoyed witnessing the end of the world, but he would have missed it if it had happened over the next two days. Upon opening his eyes, he had no concept at all of what time it was other than the incredibly bright sunlight obviously indicating daytime. The sleep was mentally refreshing and his injuries seemed to hurt less, but a splitting headache raged behind his eyes and his limbs trembled even worse than the days prior.

The images of whatever dream he had been having faded before his eyes as he sat up and set his feet on the floor. Accursed weak body… He held his head in his hands a moment to wait out the tunneling of his vision. Once that finished, he took in his surroundings.

The room gave off the impression of cleanliness with its white art deco themes and relatively Spartan furniture arrangement – just the bed, a dresser, and a nightstand with a dial clock and lamp. A large black screen was set into the wall facing the bed. A door to the right of the television led into an equally clean-looking bathroom. He could feel plush white carpet under his feet. The room must have been situated on the outer ring of the tower, as almost the entire left wall was glass window. New York's skyline spread out on the horizon, a glittering grey metal expanse far more stratified and harsh than Asgard's sprawling cities.

Above all, the room was whisper quiet. Loki could hear himself breathing. Hence his surprise when Jarvis's voice cut through the quiet to greet him.

"Good afternoon, sir."

Loki shut his eyes and was silent for a moment before answering. Hopefully he wouldn't be here long enough to get used to the damn computer. "Good afternoon, Jarvis," he replied evenly, massaging his temples with his fingertips.

"I was told to inform you that you'll be restricted to this floor for the time being."

"An entire floor all to myself? I'll live like a king."

"With all due respect, I'm a computer program, sir. Sarcasm is lost on me."

"Forgive my ignorance," Loki muttered darkly. "Can you answer my questions, at least, or have you been told to not accept my vocal signature, or some such nonsense?"

"Within reason, sir. How may I serve you?"

Loki coughed once, suddenly recognizing the hollowness in his gut to be hunger. "What about food and drink? As convenient as it would be, I cannot live upon air alone."

"Miss Potts anticipated such a need. If you will, take a right down the hallway. The third door on your left will lead down another corridor into a small dining area that has been stocked recently."

"Miss Potts seems to think of everything."

Jarvis did not seem to acknowledge that. "If you need anything else, please don't hesitate to ask, sir."

Loki did not bother to reply. The no-doubt intentional pleasantry of the computer's tone of voice irritated him. As it had said, it was useless to insult it or be offended by it, but it made him grit his teeth either way.

The venture down the hallway was slow going; he kept a steadying hand on the wall as he went while his head felt like it was trying to lift off his shoulders and float away. About ten feet from the door, Jarvis spoke again. "And begging your pardon, sir, you have visitors."

Loki paused just outside the kitchen entrance, frowning. Splendid. He took a steadying breath against the dull pounding behind his eyes and walked in.

A similarly decorated kitchen greeted him when he finally reached it – mostly white, but with the gleaming chrome of stereotypical kitchen appliances here and there and an island complete with a whole other sink. A small table with four chairs, also white, was situated near another large window that faced the opposite direction of the one in his room. He wondered idly if Stark had many other floors outfitted in such a manner, for 'visitors' and the like.

Four people were at the table, one standing. He knew their faces. Three of the four at the table were shooting daggers at him with their eyes – Tony Stark, Nick Fury, and an especially irate Clint Barton. Pepper merely sat back in her chair, legs crossed and hands folded demurely in her lap. Standing between the window and the table with his arms crossed over his chest and a furrow in his terribly earnest brow was Steven Rogers, Captain America.

Of them all, Rogers seemed to visually inspect Loki the most. He was much like Jarvis in that he was nearly impossible to take offense from. The man was too genuine to have capacity for deceit. The gaze of Captain America made Loki feel the most defenseless; it was frank and steadfast and free of arrogance. Regardless, a close-lipped smile spilt Loki's features.

"My dear lady, gentlemen, it is indeed an honor. Had I known I would be entertaining guests, I would have put on something a little more professional."

Fury and Barton's scowl was simultaneous. Pepper, Stark, and Rogers remained neutral. Loki remained smiling. The tension in the room would have put curls in the straightest of hair; his entrance only seemed to strengthen it. He turned his eyes onto Fury.

"You look well, Director."

"Shut it, convict," the spy barked. Fury's hands remained flat on the table, but Loki had a feeling they could go from resting to active quite quickly. Across the table, Barton had his fingers knit together and under his chin as if he were praying. Only the blatant anger in his eyes and the bouncing of his right knee indicated his unease.

Fury stood and walked over to Loki. "Keep your hands where I can see them," Fury said, taking a turn around the demigod, eyes examining him.

"Your wish is my command," Loki said, keeping his hands at his side and relaxed. Fury was a spy and an inherent creature of deceit himself, but he wasn't so unpredictable as to launch an attack on him.

"Stark says you're pretty diminished. To the point of us low mortals."

Loki felt a pluck at his elbow as Fury pulled on his sleeve to examine a tear in the faded black cloth, stitching exposed like sinew. Something like irritation fluttered in Loki's chest, but he kept it from showing on his face. "I suppose Mr. Stark is more inclined to the truth than I am, so it is quite safe for you to believe him."

At this point, Fury seemed to have finished his walk-around. He came to a stop facing Loki, his own hands clasped behind his back. "Well, you do look like something my dog dragged in."

Loki's smile took on a pointed air. Have your power removed and all of a sudden, people seemed to think that disrespect was perfectly acceptable.

"If I had any remaining mote of power left to me, trust me, Director…" His smile carried a tinge of malice. "You would know."

Fury wasn't fazed.

"Experience hasn't allowed me to trust too easily. Particularly you or Tony Stark." The last part he aimed over his shoulder at the billionaire. Stark was playing on his phone and didn't seem to notice. Fury's one eye leveled once more on Loki. There was not fear there, or desperation, or even hate. "I would have preferred you to have stayed on Asgard."

"Then Odin should have had you for his council, then." The venom in Loki's voice surprised himself.

"Explain."

"You had the whole of it the other night. The All-Father saw fit to punish me by reducing me to your feeble status and banish me to your realm. It's an established precedent; Thor's exile seemed to have set him to rights. Why should it not work for the second son?" Loki's smile turned sour by the time he finished speaking.

"Because you're evil," Barton offered bluntly from his seat. Fury shot the Hawk a withering look that Loki doubled. He wasn't like to forget that arrow.

"The question was rhetorical, you ill-bred scut."

Barton got to his feet angrily, but Fury stopped him.

"Barton, sit yourself down. There are actually rules that apply here and thrashing a political prisoner definitely breaks a couple."

"What's stopped you before, I wonder," Loki mused quietly, but loud enough for Fury to hear. The one eye narrowed almost imperceptibly.

"Oh, come on, Fury," Stark scoffed, sticking his phone back into his pocket. "I don't care who his dad is. Since when do laws apply to an inter-dimensional criminal?"

"The regulations aren't exactly specific, particularly since they weren't written with beings like Loki and Thor in mind. Kinda leaves it up to interpretation," came Steve's ever-reasonable voice from the window. He glanced at Fury. "I took a look at the handbook a while back."

Pepper spoke finally. "Not to mention the Chitauri have been trying to kill him in return for failing them."

Damn, ousted. Loki's mouth remained slightly turned up in amusement, but his eyes flashed. His situation was looking weaker and weaker by the minute, advantageous as it was. He bit back his pride. _Bide your time, sir. Even the golden apple takes time to ripen_. "Yes, political asylum and all that," he added. "They nearly succeeded the other night, but luckily the Norns* saw fit for me to run into Miss Potts."

A mixture of reactions passed around the room. Barton's face was a mask of frustration. Pepper and Fury remained stern and professional. Tony looked bored, an eyebrow arched in an irritated manner. Rogers was no doubt confused over what exactly a Norn was.

Loki glanced at each of them in turn before ending finally on Fury. The perks of following one's own rules were immense, but Loki could appreciate the dedication Man seemed to have to his written laws. If anything, it at least allowed him the ability to take advantage of it. "My life is in your capable hands, Director," he preened.

"You don't deserve this, but fortunately for you, it's out of my hands at this point. The last thing I need is some kind of interplanetary political scene."

"To be sure, my heart bleeds for your troubles." No need for them to know that Odin likely wouldn't care a mote whether or not S.H.I.E.L.D. took him. Or the Chitauri. That information was only on a need-to-know basis.

"You'll definitely be kept here, though." This brought an immediate protest from Stark, but Fury continued on. "You want asylum? Best place for it is right here."

Loki wondered if this was recompense to Stark for hacking into the helicarrier's mainframe. Either way, he fought back laughing too much at the genuine look of dismay on the genius's face.

"I wouldn't want to take advantage of Mr. Stark's hospitality."

"You're damn right you wouldn't. Fury, this is my property. You can't just go around offering it up to people."

"You're the one that's pushing for it to be the damn headquarters, Stark. It's as much Avengers property now as it is yours," Fury replied sharply. "Loki, please. I insist." Oh yes, there was some personal payback going on here. Loki's smile showed his teeth this time.

"You have my thanks."

Fury even deigned to force something that might have been a mocking smile. "In the meantime, I'll be looking more into the situation. If there's Chitauri here, we have something of a problem on our hands." He looked over his shoulder. "Cap, Barton." His hands still clasped behind his back, Nick Fury made for the door, Rogers and Barton following in his wake. Rogers did not meet Loki's eyes. Barton made it a point to shoulder into him as he passed.

Loki could only take the hit and smile. They may have their misgivings about him, but none of them seemed to place him at an elevated status of threat. Once the other three had left, Stark emitted a sigh of frustration. The man rose from his seat, frown still aimed where Nick Fury's departing back had last been seen. "Well, slick, enjoy your stay. Don't break my stuff, stay where you're put, and we'll get along swimmingly I'm sure."

"I don't do well with promises, Mr. Stark."

Stark stopped abreast of Loki on his way out.

"Then I can't promise that I won't mess up your day," Stark replied and walked out. Pepper was following suit when Loki's eyes flicked up at her. Maybe she flinched, maybe not.

"No passing threats, Miss Potts?" he queried loftily. She paused in the door, one hand on the frame.

Pepper's expression locked into an eternally pleasant smile, the one she must save for clients and meetings and conferences. The movement of her face was the same, but it was a far cry from the genuine smile she had given him the night they met. He could appreciate its chill. His own mouth curved into a small, amused smirk.

"Everyone else seems to have covered that fairly well," she replied evenly.

"You're an efficient woman."

"I'm not sure I've heard that given as a compliment, but I'll appreciate it all the same." Pepper crossed her arms, and her eyes watched him. Amusing. Her guard was up. On one hand, he lamented the loss of the one person who had shown him any kind of mercy or respect of late, minus Thor. That was another matter entirely. On the other, though, it was best for her to learn now that he wasn't to be trusted than later. Miss Potts was a lovely woman, regardless of the company she kept, and Loki had decided that he didn't want to see anything unfortunate happen to her.

Of course, if it were him holding a knife to her throat, he imagined he wouldn't really think about it. "I'm not convinced you hate me as openly as your associates do." Loki paused a moment; Pepper inclined her head for him to continue. "In light of how easy it was to gain your trust and how I nearly led your lover to his death, I really doubt you want to be on my side. However, you find it difficult to deeply resent me. Something like pity, I imagine?"

He shrugged with one shoulder. "Your experience with me has been decidedly less personal than that of the Iron Man and his associates, and an outsider's view of the entire debacle just doesn't give you the proper amount of justification to purely hate me as Tony Stark does."

Pepper's mouth had wrinkled into something like a rueful smirk. "You think you know me," she said. Something in her tone indicated that things were indeed quite personal.

"I think and know many things, Miss Potts. You should know that to pity me is a mistake. I don't take well to pity."

"I think you're right," she replied coolly. His grin was all teeth.

"But…you still don't know me, do you, Miss Potts?" He took a small step towards her. Pepper swayed slightly, obviously fighting the impulse to take a step back in turn. Loki's low laugh came nearly unbidden. "You're learning, though. I can tell."

Was it malice that was pushing him to try and find the right buttons to push? His pranks used to be harmless for the most part, done out of pure mischief. Now, though, there was a tinge of something else there. The Chitauri invasion had been a result of his world being flipped upside down by discovering his true identity. One part of him wanted to pick that back up and resume, but another just wanted to jest. Words and magic were his domain; devoid now of one, he had to resort to the other to maintain character.

Her first response was to execute the smile that never quite reached her eyes. "You're certainly a great teacher," she said politely before turning and heading off at a brisk walk down the hallway. Loki waited a moment until he heard the elevator doors shut with a 'ping' and depart to some other floor of the tower.

With his enemies departed, he finally allowed himself to rub at the space between his eyebrows to try and assuage the pounding behind his eyes. He needed water.

He dropped a glass on the floor and broke it before finally succeeding in filling one. Several cups later, he was rooting through cabinets for sustenance. He discovered milk and other perishable items in the refrigerator. That particular human invention was quite interesting – a free-standing, more or less air-tight box that produced its own cold through chemicals instead of ice. Erik Selvig deigned to explain it to him in small detail after requesting one for the physicist's construction of the portal device. Something about keeping materials cool.

Halfway through inventorying the pantry, a thought occurred to him. "Jarvis," he said, looking up from a box of something called 'Bisquik.' It was afternoon, per the clock above the oven, but he didn't particularly care. Loki followed his own brand of time, and pancakes were considered breakfast food.

"Yes, sir."

"So," he began, stepping out of the pantry, box in hand, "I'm afraid that I'm woefully unfamiliar with…cooking, in general. I assume that 'instant pancake mix' does not mean they instantaneously materialize when I open the box?"

"Quite right, sir. If you will, there are instructions on the back of the box."

Loki had discovered this as Jarvis spoke. Reading the box, he wandered towards the oven, free hand trailing along the counter. "Any tips?"

"The pans are non-stick, but it is recommended that you use butter to prevent sticking."

"You're a boon to mankind."

"I live to serve, sir."

Loki swore that he detected a hint of sarcasm in the computer's tone.

He eventually found that human food and cooking technology were both marvelous and frustrating. It took some minutes to dig through the multitudes of unnecessary cooking items to find a mixing bowl, a griddle and a spoon. The directions were incredibly simple, though, and the oven heated up ten times faster than the wood-burning ones on Asgard.

An image of two boys, one fair-haired and the other with hair dark as ink, escaping the kitchen, pastries in hand and being chased by an angry cook with a ladle materialized in his mind and vanished almost as quickly as it had come. Loki had to stop himself from snapping the spatula in his hands.

That must have been somebody else's memory.

The first two pancakes were disastrous. One burned and the other fell apart mid-flip, but both were edible. After the third and fourth, he got the hang of it and spiced up the recipe by adding a banana. Maybe Thor was known for his voracious appetite, but Loki was no slouch himself. Particularly when he hadn't eaten a meal proper since…well, he couldn't quite remember. Hopping realms and world domination attempts never left more than enough to time for simple meals.

Three stacks of pancakes and half a gallon of milk later, he cleaned up and headed off to explore his prison

His floor of Stark Tower turned out to be something of a guest suite. There were a couple of other bedrooms apart from his own, each with its own theme or color, but never deviating much from the clean, professional image of the first. There was a sitting room, complete with imitation fire place, television and wide window for yet another picturesque scene of New York.

As his body wandered, so did his mind.

The Chitauri hadn't made another move yet, it seemed. Maybe they couldn't track him. It did occur to him that his magically-assisted arrival on Earth could have triggered their alarms. With that dissipated, he was decidedly not magical. Maybe they were devising a plan.

He returned to his room, pondering. During one of the less hostile times the Other had spoken with him about the Chitauri race, a rare event, it had spoken of a talent that some of the higher echelon Chitauri possessed – shapeshifting. It certainly was realistic; Loki could do it to a point himself. It was more magic than physiological, but it did work a good percentage of the time. Genuine shapeshifting, though… that could be a problem. The Chitauri were bipedal like humans and built more or less the same. Who was to say that they couldn't just turn into an anonymous office worker and infiltrate the Stark building?

Loki's reflection frowned back at him in the mirror of the bathroom, where his feet had taken him unbidden. He put his hands on the sink counter and leaned against them. That would not be ideal, but there were obstacles in the way, as well. Jarvis was one. Stark's numerous and overly-paranoid security measures were another. Was it possible? Loki could likely make an attempt and be nearly successful, at least without deactivating Jarvis somehow.

That was his one-up on the vile aliens, then – Jarvis. The computer was nearly omnipotent within the building, a regular Heimdall in virtual form. The Chitauri were advanced, yes – they had interspace transportation, energy-powered weapons, but these were also biologically, and in the case of the Other, magically controlled. Once Stark had destroyed most of the fleet, the grunts on the ground had shut down when the mothership was lost. It definitely gave Loki a lesson to learn: hiveminds are lovely for efficient work and production, but were a significant weakness in a battle situation.

His would-be assassin may very well be one of those independent Chitauri. Otherwise, it should have deactivated with the rest of them. That wasn't a particularly comforting thought. Loki leaned closer to the mirror, pulling at the dark skin under his eyes and noting the lankness of his hair. Unfortunately, Jarvis was also one of the biggest things standing between him and Stark's legendary reserves of information. Cutting power? Stark likely had back-up generators and then back-up back-up generators, not to mention self-sustaining wireless devices that had no connection at all to the arc reactor powering the building.

Loki's brow furrowed, wrinkling a half-healed cut above his eyebrow. Things would be interesting, that was certain. He still hadn't decided whether or not he would be leveling the building when done with it. He angled his head to the left, catching sight of a left-over mark on his cheekbone from the muzzle. The gleaming white of the bath, a large circular tub with a brushed glass wall around it, caught his eye. A hot bath or shower would likely help with the aches and pains. The cuts on his face were still half-healed, and the wound on his back would likely need to be addressed, if it hadn't festered yet.

Hah, one thing Pepper Potts hadn't thought of.

The quest for food over, some personal hygiene would be in order. At least the bath was roughly the same as everywhere else – turn the handle, water comes out. And there was soap provided. Loki rubbed his hands together. He'd get the hang of this useless, little world yet.

-A-

Heimdall could see everything. It was both blessing and burden. The tragedies he could see coming he could not warn of. It would tamper with the balance of the universe. He was sworn to serve Odin and unless Odin told him to go out and save people, he would remain there at the end of the Asbru bridge until Ragnarök. He did not like to think on that day.

He interrupted Thor, because he knew the Odinson would be coming and what he would be asking about. There were usually two things in the forefront of the Prince's mind – Jane Foster and the current status of Midgard. A third thing, though, had recently become a priority for him.

"He rests, Odinson," Heimdall said without turning. Thor stepped up beside him, trouble clouding his brow like a thunderstorm. "There have been no disturbances since the first night."

"I feel responsible, Heimdall," he said miserably. "I think on it constantly. What could I have done to prevent this? He is my brother, and I've failed him."

"Trouble yourself not, my prince. Loki is his own master. There are events in his life that have opened two paths to him – that of being your brother and a prince of Asgard, and that of the dangerous outsider that befits an enemy. It is his choice to have followed the path of evil."

"Yes, he has created his own fate, but he is not evil," Thor said with stern confidence. "Only misguided."

Finally Heimdall's piercing gaze flicked towards Thor. "And you are the one to say so?"

Thor returned the gaze with a fierce one of his own. He knew that Heimdall meant no offense, but often played the devil's advocate as per his role of neutrality. "I know so. We grew up together. Loki does not have the capacity to do the things he has done in sound mind." Heimdall returned his eyes to the swirl of stars and space beyond the bridge. Thor's steady stare remained on the all-seeing guard a moment before doing the same. "If I can, I want to help fix things, set him straight, and bring him home to Asgard."

"Will you?"

"Should I be in that place at the proper time, I will. I have hope, though, that Loki will forge his own path back to us, as he always has." He gave a rueful chuckle. "My attempts thus far have been disastrous."

"Be mindful of your assumptions. Even the very wise cannot see to all ends, Thor Odinson."

"A wise saying." Thor turned to find Odin walking up behind them; Heimdall had seen the All-Father coming. The king of Asgard paused next to his son, staff held at his side. Of the people of Asgard, only Odin seemed to be able to know when Heimdall had seen something of note. Odin's blue eye lingered on the guard, half-lidded. "What do you see, Heimdall, with regards to my wayward son?"

Heimdall inhaled deeply, adjusting his two-handed grip on the greatsword. Thor would not like this. "The enemy will be upon him soon, sire."

"_What_?" Thor's outburst came predictably. "If he rests now, he won't be ready. We have to warn him!" Odin placed a restraining hand on Thor's shoulder.

"I've told you once. Loki has made his own enemies. If he cannot handle them himself, then he should have had the foresight to choose an ally that would not try to kill him should he fail." Odin turned, satisfied, and made his way off.

Conflict deepened the dark clouds on Thor's brow. Heimdall's expression remained blank. He too was intrigued to see how Loki's fate played out on Midgard. The guard had had a direct hand in Loki's fall from grace; had he not broken free of the ice Loki had encased him in, the god of mischief might be on Asgard now.

And Heimdall might still stand guard to the gate of the nine realms. It was not his place, though, to ponder what might have been. Gradually, Thor either found or didn't find peace in the depths of Yggrasil and followed in his father's wake. Heimdall watched them go and settled back to continue his vigil over the realms.

...

**AN: ***The Norns are the Norse equivalent of the Greek Fates.

Maybe it's a bit early, but I've waited for the past however many pages of this to bring the title of the story into play. It. Was. Exciting. If anybody can tell me where Heimdall's wise saying comes from, I'll love you forever.

Thanks again to everybody who's reading and enjoying! I am just tickled pink. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. The chapters are about to start getting longer, too, about the same length as this one.


	5. The Issue of Trust

Loki had been halfway through the paneling outside the elevator, hand hung up a particularly snarled length of green-coated wire, when the sound of the contraption coming up the shaft made him pause. That would be Happy Hogan, Stark's thick but endearing chauffeur. Hopefully the manservant would have with him the books or the computer Loki requested. Solitude was something he often cherished, but he quickly discovered that he was not a creature suited by captivity. He grew bored quite easily, a characteristic of his since childhood. This was only enhanced by his recovery. He was, after all, a creature of chaos.

Jarvis could only answer so many of his questions before he ventured into things even Jarvis didn't know or couldn't answer due to Stark limiting the computer's algorithms and programming. Or maybe the AI just got annoyed. Jarvis's dry albeit programmed personality was amusing and when not answering Loki's questions, formed a companionable commentator with a formidable store of knowledge. Some of the more memorable conversations Loki had had over the past couple days had been with Jarvis; the best always happened while either watching the multitude of mindless satellite television channels available or while pitting Asgardian philosophy against Midgardian.

Granted, it was more pitting Loki's mind against whatever Jarvis could find over the Internet, but more stimulating than watching the History channel. Stark's mind was one that Loki craved to challenge and explore, but the self-proclaimed genius seemed content to keep Loki locked away and out of earshot. And when Jarvis was addressing something else, Loki had taken to disassembling the various bits of technology in his prison. He had already learned the functions of the things foreign to him, so learning how they worked was the next step. And it was just fun to dismantle something.

Hence why he was elbow deep in the guts of the button panel. The book 'request' had frankly been more of a threat. Stark allowed him a blessed minute of snark-free silence over the intercom on the same panel. The speech went something like this: "_Mr. Stark, if you continue to refuse to allow me some sort of entertainment, books, pencil and paper, what have you …books preferably, or one of your laptop computers... I shall continue to dismantle everything within these few rooms and reassemble it in such a manner that you should be afraid to use even the toothbrushes in the bathrooms…I imagine common courtesy is a hard thing to show to an enemy, but allow me to point out that…oh, what is your human phrase for it? Ah, right. Idle hands are the devil's handiwork. Please consider that the lesser of two evils would be an occupied god of chaos versus an unoccupied one."_

Surprisingly, Stark seemed to understand. Perhaps not so surprising, both of them being in possession of an active mind and a need to learn and know. He had been unhappy – or, Pepper, rather, had been unhappy – upon discovering that Loki had broken some exotic-looking piece of modern art in the sitting room, though. Loki's thoughts recently had taken it upon themselves to travel the paths of memory and the slippery slope of introspection and emotion. The unfortunate piece of art had had the misfortune of being within reach during one particularly notable bout of rage.

Those trains of thought he tried to avoid, but it seemed even he couldn't control what went on behind his eyes anymore. This didn't startle him; he had learned to turn it in productive directions. The near-manic activity whirling between his ears kept him focused, more or less, and for a time, had been a better fuel than food. And the more he fueled it, kept the twister of thought raging toward a conclusion where he returned to his former glory and his fury brought to bear against his enemies, the less apt he was to think about Asgard and its regrettable memories.

Loki snatched his hand out of the access hole and straightened, screw driver in hand. He lingered against the wall, waiting for the elevator to reach his floor. When Pepper didn't deliver food and other necessities to him, Happy did it. Loki tread softly around Pepper; there was something fascinating about her in a look-don't-touch sort of manner. Poor Happy, though. The man was relatively unflappable through dialogue, but he was easy to startle. Especially when Loki would appear in the least expected place. Today, he chose the right side of the elevator, just out of sight.

A loafered foot came through the elevator door when it opened. "Living up to your namesake today, Mr. Hogan?" Loki queried lightly, eyes tilted up catch the man's reaction. Instead, he found himself looking down the barrel of a gun and a disturbingly blank expression on Happy Hogan's jowly visage as he stepped out of the elevator to face the reduced god.

Something was terribly wrong.

Loki looked from the gun up to meet Happy's eyes. "Now, Mr. Hogan," he heard himself saying, "If you need me to apologize for last time, I will, so long as _that_ is pointed at less of a living target." His heart had picked up a couple beats per minute. While magic and mischief were his primary forms of fighting, he could manage hand-to-hand fair enough. Usually, though, he was disarming his enemy of their knife or sword, not a gun.

There was something wrong, something wrong with the human face staring back at him. It was as if Happy wasn't happy in his own skin, like he didn't quite fit into it…

The elevator pinged softly as it was called away. The Happy-monster took only a split second to glance at the elevator. That was all it took. Loki dropped the screwdriver, twisted to the right, and grabbed Happy's wrist. The gun almost immediately went off, setting his ears ringing at the closeness. Loki forced the man's arm up and brought his knee up into Happy's stomach. He felt the man fold over his knee, but looked up just in time to see Happy's gun hand smash the top of the gun in his face. Loki tasted blood, stunned just enough for Happy to break his grip on his gun hand, turn and plant a foot in his chest, and send him tumbling into the elevator door.

He managed to roll to the side before a bullet punched a hole through the sheet metal behind him. Planting his hands on the carpet, Loki swept Happy's feet out from under him with a sweep of one long leg. The driver hit his back with a thud, but as Loki rose into a crouch to spring for the weapon, Happy used his momentum in an unprecedented display of athleticism his relatively bulky frame seemed incapable of and rebounded back onto his feet. Hissing like a snake, Loki propelled himself inside Happy's reach and landed several quick elbows and jabs to the man's rib cage.

Something was wrong.

Happy, like his master, talked when he didn't need to. Even when quiet, his expression usually told volumes of what he thought. Loki found it quite comical. Not this Happy, though. The only thing Loki could see was the cold, nearly murderous intent in the man's eyes and the slight downturn of his mouth.

Loki's blows set Happy back a few steps, but the man still threw off a couple swings himself, wild jabs and heavy handed swings that made even Loki wince. Also wrong. Happy Hogan was a boxer, one of the first bits of personal information Loki had wheedled out of the big guard before Happy caught on and stopped answering his questions. The fight went back and forth like this for a few more seconds before Happy's gun cracked Loki in the jaw, sending him staggering sideways. This wouldn't do. He and Happy were of a height, but Happy had several stones on him in weight.

The gun blew another hole in the wall at his back a split second after he dodged again. This couldn't go on for much longer. Loki propelled himself off the floor and dashed down the hallway and dove into the corridor leading to the kitchen, the bark of the gun chasing him but its bite missing by mere inches.

He reached the kitchen and made automatically for the knife block, vaulting easily over the island and scattering spice jars and the bowl of fruit next to the sink. He had just enough time to snag a couple of the knives before Happy reappeared. Loki didn't even look.

He spun, the blade of a steak knife slipping from his fingers in an overhead throw. It certainly wasn't one of his throwing knives, that was certain. It landed wide, quivering in the door frame, but it had enough of an effect to make Happy dodge it. When the guard reappeared, though, the gun was no longer in his hand. Instead, he had a knife in his own hand, a long, thin, and curved blade edged in red.

The pieces fell into place in Loki's mind. He knew that knife.

"_Hamrskifter_.*" His voice was little more than a chilly hiss of contempt that belied the feverish light in his eyes, turning them from dark green to a light jade. His hunch had been right; the Chitauri assassin was a shapeshifter, and had very obviously just waltzed right into Stark Tower with somebody else's face.

For a moment, the two stared at each other. Loki was overly aware of blood running freely from a cut on his forehead and the metallic taste of it lingered on his tongue. The assassin barely looked winded. For the first time in a long time, Loki was out of his element. He hadn't fought directly for his own survival since Jotünnheim. Everything else had been easy. But now, the knives in his hand were flimsy kitchen utensils and with no magic at his disposal, he was forced to do battle like a human Neanderthal. And he couldn't foresee a reasonable outcome.

Finally, the assassin's face moved. Happy's face twisted into something that must have been a Chitauri smile but only resulted in the human face looking distorted and deformed. "Cornered like a rat in a cage," it hissed with Happy's voice. It would take some time before Loki would likely be able to interact with the real Happy without thinking about killing him first. Provided he survived.

"Coward," Loki spat. "If you are truly here to deliver me to my maker, then you should have done it like a warrior, and not some shadow spawn." All of it, bluster to buy himself time.

"You would have done the same, No One's Son. _He_ has no preference as to how I take your life, only that I take it and present your head to him for his viewing pleasure."

"A man after my own heart," Loki crooned. With a flick of his wrist, he sent another knife spiraling towards the Chitauri. It swatted the thing out of the way, its own knife raised to throw when Loki dove over the island once more to close the distance between them. He tucked into a roll, feeling the knife sear its way across the top of his shoulder as he moved. He came up onto his feet, one hand thrusting upwards to stab the assassin with his remaining knife, but only managed to clatter off some manner of bony growth on the alien's blocking arm. Happy's suit shredded under the blade, the ripping clear and audible.

The alien grabbed the wrist of the hand bearing the knife and Loki's progress came to a screeching halt. Its grip was surprisingly strong; Loki could feel the ligaments in his wrist grinding. A twinkle in near the edge of the assassin's sleeve caught his eye just in time for him to duck his head. The Chitauri's free hand swung by overhead, a long needle projecting out from the base of its hand.

Loki managed to catch that wrist in his own grip when it came back around to jab him in the stomach. The point of the needle stopped mere inches from the front of his shirt. And there they halted, each fighting the other's grip and pull, gaining ground and losing ground.

Sweat began to break out on Loki's forehead within seconds. His recovery had been speedy and welcome, but not speedy enough it seemed. The Chitauri forced him back a step. Loki had to push its hand to the side or else be speared by the needle and shot through with whatever dread poison coating it. A thought niggled in the back of his mind, stepping forward finally to poke him in the face with a forgotten ally.

"Jarvis!" His voice was hoarse from the effort, but was loud enough to register on the AI's microphones.

Loki wasn't too proud to admit that he heaved a ragged breath of relief at Jarvis's dry, British accent. "Your plight hasn't gone unnoticed, sir. Assistance is moving as we speak."

"Tell them to be quick about it!"

The muscles in his arms were starting to burn, and he was a neuron transfer away from using the alien's weight against it when the Chitauri beat him to it and pulled down on his knife hand. Loki lurched forward, vision reeling.

For the first time since arriving, he finally was truly thankful for Pepper Potts's incessant ability to think of everything.

With the degradation of his Asgardian clothes, Pepper had offered him an alternative. Tony, naturally, refused to pay for any clothes for his unwelcome houseguest, so Pepper liberated some of Tony's clothes from his closet – the shirts and trousers he never really wore. Therefore, they were nearly all insanely obnoxious.

For instance, the shirt he wore now. It was maroon in color, but made of a fabric with a silvery sheen that would shift colors in different light. The pants were blessedly mundane, but due to the height difference between Loki and Stark, were about three inches too short. Their differing body types also made the shirt irritatingly tight across Loki's shoulders but loose around the middle.

The Chitauri's needle snarled in the extra fabric. As it tore through the shirt, Loki released the hand and spiraled away. This gave him just enough time to plant a kick in the back of the assassin's knee. The leg buckled and the Chitauri went into a kneeling position. The motion forced Loki into a crouch, his wrist still caught, but all the better for him to open up the Chitauri's guard. He pushed his arm out and fired off another kick aimed for the Chitauri's head.

The assassin caught his leg easily with its free hand and simultaneously rose back to its feet and slammed Loki down on his back on the kitchen floor. He felt his head bounce off the tile, and through the stars shooting painfully across his eyes, he heard his knife clatter away. The Chitauri filled his vision as it leaned forward to grab the front of his shirt and pull him into a sitting position. Happy's mouth produced some manner of alien language. Oh, at least it had the respect to offer him something that was no doubt some manner of Chitauri death prayer.

It drew the needle back. Loki's hands scrabbled at the grip on his shirt, head spinning, spitting blood. This was it. The end. He wondered idly if Odin was watching. Heimdall obviously was. Would Frigga weep for him? Did he really care?

Suddenly, the world lit up like daybreak over Valhalla. The Chitauri jerked backwards and crackling blue bolts darted from its back and down its arm into Loki. Most of the electricity dissipated by that point, but it was enough to make his arms and legs jerk of their own accord and his vision to shudder. Smoking and limp, the alien fell forwards onto him, a dead weight on his chest. A gust of breath escaped his mouth with a muted noise of pain and relief, and Loki let his head fall back onto the tile.

A curvy, skirted figure interrupted his view of the kitchen ceiling, bright auburn curls gathered over her left shoulder. Loki's mouth drew back in a bloody grin.

"Ah, Agent Romanoff."

The S.H.I.E.L.D. spy pursed her lips, unimpressed. "I can see why Fury was ok with keeping you here instead of in a vault under his watch," she quipped icily. Loki sighed through his nose, picking his head up to look at the mass on top of him.

"Please underestimate me. It will make striking back at your little troupe all the more satisfying."

"A hard threat to take seriously from a man stuck under a dead alien."

Her dry contempt was almost refreshing. Loki pushed himself into a sitting position and rolled the Chitauri away from him. It stared upwards with Happy's dead eyes, not an image he was like to forget. Seeing the real Happy Hogan again wouldn't help. "I had complete control of the situation," he muttered, fingering the rip in his shirt. The half healed injury in his back twinged as he got up, and he lost against displaying a pained wince.

His brain didn't acknowledge the punch until he staggered up against the island and blood was running anew from his nose. When he looked up at Romanoff, she was merely standing with her arms crossed over her chest. The pure icy hatred in her eyes rivaled Pepper's.

Loki laughed.

…

"So you've been here how long?"

Natasha Romanoff let the question hang in the air a moment, turning a cool eye on Tony Stark, who stood opposite her. He stared right back at her, hands on his hips and eyebrows raised in that innocent yet challenging manner he was so good at. "I'm just wondering, 'cause, you know…It's my building, and I'm getting pretty sick of people that I am not fond of crashing the party." Stark's dark eyes flicked over to Loki at the same time his hand did in a flippant gesture. "Namely you, but I think that horse is pretty much dead."

Leaning against the kitchen island, Loki aimed an only slightly less-than-venomous look at Stark, but did not bother to reply. As it turned out, Loki's assassin hadn't been the only intruder. Another one had made it all the way to the tower's research and development level only to find Stark there, testing out his Mark VIII armor. Loki hadn't learned the details, but Stark had mentioned that one of the heat testing chambers now needed cleaning.

Pepper shrieked upon seeing the dead version of Happy. Even proving that it wasn't Happy from the needle projecting from its wrist and the other assorted alien weaponry hadn't helped much; she stayed off to the side, looking pale and a streak of mascara running down her left cheek.

Stark was less than enthused as well. The imposters walked right through every bit of security without so much as setting off a motion sensor. This one had all of Happy's identification, his fingerprints, even his cell phone. Only the DNA had been different, a twisting, writhing triple helix that would barely hold shape on Stark's handheld device. Police had been dispatched and Jarvis was monitoring the channels to try and get a bead on the real Happy, who seemed to have disappeared.

"Fury put me here to help keep an eye on things," Natasha said finally, hands on her hips. Her eyes lingered a moment on Loki. "I'm less likely to kill out of pent up rage."

"It certainly doesn't check your fists," Loki grumbled to himself, tossing a bloody paper towel into the sink behind him. He pushed off the sink and crouched down next to the corpse. He had learned that returning to its original form had to be a conscious effort for the Chitauri; unconsciousness wouldn't automatically make it reverse. Death, though, seemed to make the change unravel a little bit. The face that looked like Happy's seemed to have taken on a greyish pallor separate from the paleness of death.

He didn't know what the Chitauri believed about the afterlife, but he hoped this one ended up in some manner of Hel. There weren't many of the Chitauri that he'd had the pleasure of chatting with. The Other was a given. The rest were mindless drones. The ones that ranked just below the Other, those were the ones that he was likely dealing with now. Loki looked upwards at the ceiling, eyes narrowed and contempt curling his lip. They watched him, the Other and Odin both. He felt their scrutiny like a lashing across his back. And there wasn't a place it seemed where he could escape it. Odin had left him powerless save for that of his own muscle and bone.

The voices of the others assembled turned his attention. Jarvis had joined in on the conversation with an update on the search for Happy. He watched without listening, brow furrowed and gaze critical and examining. That's all humans were, really, muscle and bone. They had no capacity for magic or real power. They couldn't read minds or teleport or break a man asunder physically and mentally with a flick of the wrist and few silvered words. Tony Stark was just a man in superpowered armor. Natasha Romanoff was just a woman with a dangerous skill set born out of a troubled past. Pepper Potts was just a woman with too much faith.

But there they stood, triumphant over him, over the Chitauri, over everything that had come up against them. They had their little lives with their little human needs and wants and their little human tragedies and events. They had their happiness.

Loki straightened suddenly. He was heading down that path again, the one where the past would rise up in front of him like a living memory and play out to the same ending every single time; him letting go and committing himself to plummet towards the unknowns of the space between worlds with only the intent of trying to escape his own self-created mix of tragedy, triumph and disappointment. He'd had enough. Four days of prowling around a human abode tested the limits of his attention and patience and the fury simmering in his chest began rising to a boil.

Stark's voice came cutting through the fog. "If Fury had just listened to me in the first place with regards to Greensleeves over here, the security breach wouldn't have happened, and Happy wouldn't be tied up in his bathroom closet. Now, I've got a hunch that that– " He pointed at the body. "–is going to end up in SHIELD's basement somewhere, and I will be more than happy to oblige, but right now what needs to be done is to get this guy –"

The speech came to a halt as Loki's hand wrapped around Stark's throat and held him at eye level with his back up against the wall near the door.

"Words are wind, Tony Stark," Loki hissed. "Your intelligence is commendable, but you have done nothing but react, a poor substitute for a solution in any situation, and my patience grows thin."

Even with most of his body weight being supported by his esophagus, Stark still managed to speak. "Your patience grows thin? Try having a political prisoner from another dimension living in your upstairs apartment, one that tried to subjugate your race and take over your world…"

The man's retort died halfway to completion as Loki's hand tightened around his throat. His arm shook from the effort, letting Stark slip back to his feet. Loki's features could have been carved from stone, save for the blaze in his eyes and the twitch in his upper lip. "I am through with your churlish, pribbling tongue. Were I Odin, I would have it ripped out long ago," he said through gritted teeth.

"Loki, put him down."

Loki's gaze snapped around to find Romanoff leveling a gun at him. Where the woman hid all her weapons was beyond him. The ice in her eyes almost hid the apprehension he could see in the set of her red lips. Regardless, she met his eyes without flinching and her hands stayed steady. "Or what?" he said quietly. "You'll kill me?"

Her eyes hardened, narrowing almost imperceptibly. That was answer enough. Loki's mouth pulled back in something that would have been a smirk, but turned into more of a sneer. He let go and Stark fell to the floor, coughing and gasping. His eyes still smoldered and lingered on Romanoff. She lowered the gun only slightly, still at the ready.

Silence reigned for a long moment. Loki longed for just a whisper of his power; holding eye contact with him for this long used to be dangerous.

"Now," she started, her voice taut and commanding, "Nobody here has been an exception. The Chitauri attacked both Loki and Stark Industries."

"I can see where you're going with this, Agent Romanoff," Loki drawled, cutting her off. "You may hold the keys to my shackles, but the very last thing I'll ever do is to ally myself with your little _team_, even against the Chitauri." He fairly spat the last word, aiming it at Stark.

The Iron Man made it back to his feet, rubbing at the red finger marks on his neck. "Oh, the feeling's very mutual," he said hoarsely.

Pepper, though, seemed to be more of a mind with Romanoff than Loki and Stark. She stepped forward, arms still wrapped around herself but with her head high all the same. "Nobody said anything about being allies, but we do have a common enemy right now."

"And since that enemy has the ability to look like any of us, we have to be able know each other," Romanoff added.

"Trust, you mean?" Loki's tone was skeptical. He barked out a laugh.

"Yeah, that's a touch ludicrous, honey," Stark added. Even he was in agreement. "He's the god of _lies_."

Romanoff would not be swayed. "He also happens to know more about the Chitauri than any of us." She fixed Loki with a concentrated stare. "And Stark's AI runs the entire building. Giving him the information you have will keep you alive longer."

She looked back and forth between the two of them. "If the situation didn't demand that I be impartial, I would have put a bullet through your brain the instant I saw you."

The monster in Loki's chest rumbled angrily. He didn't care much for threats, but he knew that the spy said what she meant and meant what she said, particularly when it came to promising someone their death at her own hands. She continued.

"But I'd rather have you at hand with the information we need."

Loki narrowed his eyes. Had he been at full strength, the air would have frozen when he spoke. "Then, Miss Romanoff, the first mistake you make will be to consider me a resource."

To him, Stark was almost an intellectual peer, a walking challenge, but never a threat. Natasha Romanoff, though… she made bile rise in his throat and her deadly confidence insulted him. Her face remained a nearly impenetrable mask, only the slightest of challenging tilts angling her chin up. "We'll have to see about that," she quipped.

"I'm sure we will," he replied. "What you all fail to realize is that this is just a feeler. A test to show just how heavy-handed the next attack will have to be to break you." He looked at Stark and Pepper in turn. "The first of what will become a series of subtle infiltrations and experiments to determine what needs to be done to not be seen at all… until they make their move."

His words only seemed to confirm what the humans must have feared. Loki's eyes fell back on the lifeless corpse on the floor.

"This is only a test."

…

AN: *skin-shifter, or something similar. It was surprisingly difficult to try and find a Norwegian translation of shape shifter, and this was about the closest I got. It's still not grammatically correct, I bet, but got some help from writer Alydia Rackham, who writes amazingly, and I didn't want to hang up publishing the chapter by waiting to find it. If you happen to know the right word, by all means please correct me.

I mentioned this would be something of a wild ride, right? If any of the characters seem a little off, please let me know. I had some trouble at the halfway point with a little mini writer's block due to a little plot misdirection, and I'm afraid it shows.


	6. The Hammer

Meditation brought Loki little solace anymore – his mind always wanted to fill the silence with _something_ – but he did it now just out of habit and a loose hope it would have a placebo effect. The afternoon sun streaming through the windows warmed the skin on his bare arms as he sat crosslegged on the floor, facing the window with his fingertips steepled in his lap. His shadow cast long across the white carpet, a man-shaped blot of ink on an otherwise empty canvas. He had changed into a grey t-shirt and some black warm-ups, much more aesthetically pleasing and comfortable than any of the other loaned clothing. It left him feeling even more exposed and like a bum, but he had no armor anyway and Stark's security had been compromised already, so he figured if somebody wanted to come and kill him, he wouldn't get in the way.

Back in another life lived by somebody else, the teachers on Asgard would occasionally suggest meditation as a form of opening one's senses to the magic around them. It was one of the few times to achieve oneness with it apart from actually using it, and that only happened when healing or executing a particularly complicated spell. Loki had expounded upon the technique with time and had included levitating a small ball of iron at the same time he meditated to keep his skills sharp.

That was impossible now, though. He could sense nothing beyond the mere physical sensations of his own body – the sun warm on his skin, the glow of light through his eyelids, the sound of his own slow breathing whistling somewhat through the swelling in his nose, the occasional waft of scent from the reed diffuser in the bathroom, the lingering metallic taste of blood on his tongue. Underneath it all throbbed the dull pain from his various injuries. Normally, when he reached out, the magic reached back. It was like shaking hands with a good companion. They could sit and talk and work through some theorized or complicated spell Loki found in a book. But, no, not now. His consciousness stayed trapped inside his skull, a surly, pacing presence impatient with captivity.

Even so, he eventually tuned out the murmurings of his own mind and settle into a relaxed state where his only focus was on keeping ten breaths per minute. The other sounds of the building slowly came to life as time passed. He could hear the tiny creaks in the structural supports as the metal expanded in the afternoon sun. Occasionally, the sounds of the renovations going on above him thudded through the ceiling and once in a while, he felt the slightest sway as the wind wrapped around the tower like water around a tree. There was something endearing about Earth in a small sort of way. The denizens of Midgard were trying and pathetic and small themselves, but their world at least had a life all its own. It would never match Asgard, though; nothing could match Asgard.

Maybe it was the lack of magic and that constant mental tether to the world around him that enabled this particular session to be so thorough. The phrase about ignorance being bliss came to mind. It was a new experience, not entirely unpleasant. The only muscle he wasn't able to relax was the one in his lower back; he was certain it was either torn or it shielded a herniated disk. Emboldened by the feeling of absolute control, he cut the leash on his mind to let it wander free of the emotional baggage fettering it. He was to the point where anything could happen and he would just… let it happen.

Automatically, an image leapt up before his eyes.

Sticking out through a pile of rubble on the side of a street almost invisible from the thick dust coating it, golden horns curving upwards into the rain from beneath a slab of concrete. The vision was gone almost as soon as it appeared, falling away into some memory where somebody wearing the same helmet that looked like him but couldn't have been him was fighting back to back with a red-caped figure in a silvery helmet with wings.

Must have been somebody else's memory.

More of these regrettable memories moved seamlessly from one to the next, but every one of them featured his helmet in some way. The sensations of his physical self sitting on the floor in the guest suite of Stark Tower gradually gave way to the Loki running and fighting and casting spells in his mind. He could smell the blood, feel the chill winds of Jotünnheim against his face, hear dwarven battle cries and the clash of metal on metal, taste the ale at the victory feasts, smell the acidic and ionized remnants of some spell as it sped away from his fingertips.

"_Loki_."

That wasn't his voice. The skin around his eyes tightened just ever so slightly and this time, when he breathed in, it wasn't the quasi-polluted oxygen of Earth that freshened his lungs.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing, but he was no longer in the third guest suite on the seventeenth floor of Stark Tower. A sweeping golden balcony spread out before him. The floor was cool beneath his bare feet. Beyond the railing, an Asgardian night darkened the transition between the sky and the opening of space at the end of the Asbru bridge. Wind, light and flitting, made his hair flit around his neck like feathers.

And there, cutting a regal figure against a starry backdrop that complimented a silvery grey gown adorned with pearls, stood Frigga. Her slate blue eyes searched him a moment before settling on his face.

If he squinted, it almost looked real. A weariness settled across his shoulders. "I do so tire of being taken places I can't go myself," he said quietly. Even so, Frigga's smile was warm, as a mother's should be. She crossed the short distance between them to put her hands on his shoulders.

"My dear, what a strange arraignment these Midgardians have you in. You look properly human."

Loki managed a humorous snort, finding that he was unable to look her in the eye. Nevermind how her statement was almost as inappropriate as considering him Asgardian in the first place. He hadn't seen the woman he once called 'mother' since he'd killed Laufey in Odin's chambers. She hadn't visited him during his short stint in Asgard's dungeons, and he wondered if Odin had forbid her to do so. Her matronly eye traveled over him and her hand plucked at a lock of his raven hair. "And your hair's gotten longer. Are you eating enough? It doesn't look like it."

He couldn't answer. Some internal conflict was raging behind his eyes, the one between Loki and the one who used to go by such a name. The one that Frigga wanted to see.

The sharp tap of her other hand on his face startled him slightly, and he found himself looking up at her finally. Her face held no hostility, only raised eyebrows and pursed lips just as he was a child again and had been caught in the act of some prank. "Look at your mother when she speaks to you."

A nervous smile flitted across his face. "You still use that title even whilst knowing what I am, what I've done?"

It came out as more of a question than he intended, but Frigga only shook her head, a smile pulling at her mouth. "That title, as you put it, goes beyond blood, Loki. Odinson, Laufeyson, whatever son, you are still _my _son, and that will never change."

Even so, he caught her hand as it reached up to cup his face. "That boy is dead," he murmured. Odin was much easier to stand up to. It had been the All-Father's hand that had taken him from Jotünnheim, not Frigga's. The betrayal still stung as much, though. His own mother had known what he was and said not a word. But at the same time she seemed to persist in loving him. He felt like he was on the edge of a rocky precipice, but wasn't sure if he was about to tumble off or jump. The uncertainty troubled him.

"He was," she replied. "I mourned for him after he fell." Her smile fled. "We all did."

Loki sighed, holding her hands with his. He knocked a pebble off into the abyss. "He let go is what he did. I…" He took a shaky breath, glancing down at his feet. The maw beyond the cliff of his mind opened up. "I am sorry for your loss."

Frigga slapped him again, a little harder this time. "Loki, you're being foolish," she said plainly. Loki frowned, more than a little startled.

"_I'm_ being foolish?"

"Yes," she insisted, irritation arching one of her eyebrows higher than the other. "You can't fool me. You may lie to me, hide your intentions, and do terrible things, but you will never fool me. I raised you, you silly child."

It was said that Frigga was as much a prophet as Heimdall, but Loki couldn't tell the difference between her predicting the future or just possessing that motherly know-all. So maybe she knew something he didn't and maybe he really couldn't fool her. Regardless, he flushed a little angrily and would have said something sharp and caustic, but Frigga took his shoulders and pulled him down to her height to plant a kiss on his forehead. The action diluted the acid on his tongue. "Go. I hear your father coming, and I am not to speak with you until you come to your senses."

"I'm more like to lose my senses being trapped by those who defeated me and hunted by the army that failed me," Loki grumbled. Frigga's laugh was pleasant, wafting away his indignation as if it were smoke.

"Seeing you after so long has gladdened my spirit, dear heart. I bid you the best of skill in your endeavors."

She drew away, and as she did, the illusion faded with her. A weary noise escaped his throat with the next breath he let out and once more the light from Earth's sun tried to creep in between his eyelids.

Centuries have gone by; he was older than most of the civilizations on Earth and had outlived some of them, even. Only Frigga would still be able to make him feel like a child.

He missed the soft sound of footsteps on the carpet behind him. The touch on Loki's shoulder violently jerked him out of the reverie nearly to the point of pain. His entire body jolted and, just like that, his meditative state shattered like glass. Out of pure fighting instinct, he leapt up out of his sitting position quick as chain lightning and, before his eyes refocused and adjusted to the light, had the front of his visitor's shirt in one hand while the other was drawn back for a knife-handed strike to the throat.

"Jeez, Loki!"

Caught at the end of his grip was Pepper Potts, hands raised defensively around her face and a fearful blue eye peeking out at him. Loki descended back into himself with a shudder, suddenly cognizant of his own rapid breathing and the spiky leftovers of adrenaline playing at the edges of his vision. He let go of Pepper, turning away and passing a hand over his face. An upheaval of emotions both from the encounter with Frigga and the suddenness of Pepper's appearance left him a little queasy.

"Miss Potts." His voice cracked slightly so he cleared his throat. "Do forgive me."

When he looked back, Pepper was watching him carefully. Apprehension had her eyes wide, but she seemed even less shaken than Loki was. "No," she said finally, "That's probably my fault. I should have…come back later…or something."

"Or something," Loki agreed, rubbing the stiffness out of his back with a wince. He shook away the fading vestiges of uncertainty wrinkling his brow. And the vision of his helmet. Had that even been real or just some image his mind had conjured up?

The silence was awkward, as was the feeling of …what was it, guilt? …guilt making Loki frown. He cleared his throat again and looked out the window. When they spoke, they interrupted each other once or twice before Loki gestured for Pepper to speak first.

"Are you okay?" she asked. He must still have looked as shaken as he felt.

"Ah, yes," he replied, looking away and out the window. Only a faint outline of his reflection overlaying the urban sprawl of New York looked back at him. "Just a…relatively deep trance, if you will."

Pepper eyed him. "Well, I figured I'd see if you needed help with that knife wound…" Her eyes lighted on the dark bruises on his wrist from the assassin and lingered there uncomfortably.

Loki's eyebrows rose in mild surprise. "Even after I nearly throttled your Stark?" he asked, unable to keep the derision out of his voice. She seemed to redden a little at the 'your Stark.'

"There are days where I could throttle him myself," she replied, the ghost of a smirk pulling at the dimple in her left cheek. "Besides, I really doubt anybody else here would offer you help, Tony least of all."

Loki looked at Pepper for a long moment. What a strange woman. "I don't need your help, Miss Potts," he said finally. His smile was only a trifle condescending. "I'm not some kitten you've rescued off the street."

"Perhaps not. But I bet that cut's pretty hard to get to when you can't even see it."

This was true. He had had to resort to sitting with his back to the bathroom mirror and using the reflection to try and take care of it. To be honest, his ministrations were clumsy and the cut could have used stitches, but he managed to tape a chunk of gauze over it. That seemed to do the trick.

He hesitated a moment. Pepper took advantage of it to continue. "I don't think you're aware of it, but I know how to deal with hard-headed, eccentric men with troubled pasts who are a bit too smart for their own good. Not to mention, I feel like you aren't going to turn down an opportunity to further your own needs." Her expression stayed blessedly neutral, but there was a confident light in her eyes that replaced whatever trepidation she might have felt.

Throughout her explanation, Loki's small smirk broadened to something of a half self-conscious, half amused toothy grin. When she finished, he laughed. He had a hunch that she left one or two things unsaid, most likely something along the lines of how pathetic his situation really was. Good for her. He could handle it not being said; having it pointed out to his face by somebody else might not have prompted an ideal reaction. Even so, let Pepper have her fun.

"My dear woman, I seem to have failed to give you proper credit in being forced to deal with the ego that is Tony Stark. My condolences." He bowed stiffly at the waist.

Pepper's smile was small and tight, but genuine nonetheless. Perhaps in seeing him wounded and weak not only on occasion but on two now had melted a little bit of the ice she held for him. Loki wasn't sure if this would be dangerous for her or not. He turned towards the door, though, offering her his arm. "May I offer you a drink, Miss Potts? I really must apologize for my reaction." He was half glad Pepper had shown up; interacting with somebody would help him avoid the recently reopened wound where resided the place he once called home and the person he once called 'mother.'

She eyed his arm like it was a snake. His smile was much less venomous. "I promise I don't bite."

"Unless provoked or bored."

"Or an unsuspecting victim breaks my meditation."

Pepper looked from his arm to his face and seemed satisfied with the I'm-being-pleasant-for-once-enjoy-it expression on his face. "Can you make martinis?"

"I haven't the slightest idea as to what that may be, but I'm a wonderful improviser."

Some minutes later, Loki had his elbows propped on the table, his chin resting in one hand as he listened to Pepper talk about the finer points of yoga over his shoulder. Her requested martini sat on the table, half-finished at this point. She was a fan of olives, he found out. Out of curiosity, he had made one for himself. Leave it to Tony Stark to have his guest suites outfitted with a bar. None of it was very strong. Comparatively. Other realms produced much more potent mixtures.

Over the crackle of medical tape coming off the roll, Pepper's hand appeared out of the corner of Loki's eye, pointing at her glass. Loki politely handed it to her, amused to no end.

"Are you making fun of me?"

Loki looked up, catching sight of his half-laughing smile reflected in the window. Pepper had one hand on her hip accusingly. The other held her martini. "Me? Never. You're not amusing in the slightest, Miss Potts."

"I don't believe you. It's done, by the way," she said, gathering up the tape and gauze on the table.

"I am nothing if not sincere," Loki argued. Pepper's resulting snort of disbelief told him all he needed to know. She whirled away to return the items to a counter above the oven. Loki turned in his seat to watch her. Strange woman. He picked up his own martini, eyeing the artistic curl of orange peel floating in the middle of the glass. Something Pepper suggested, and he did like improvising. The orange peel added a light citrus flavor to the heady taste of gin. "You don't seem the type to fish for compliments nor am I one to hand them out like sweets, but you surprise me, Miss Potts."

Pepper turned, straightening her business coat with one hand as she leaned against the oven. "I surprise you?"

"For want of a better term, I'm afraid," he said, taking a sip of his drink. "You seem very much at ease. Given the situation, I'd say that's either admirable or stupid."

She seemed not to take offense to that, blunt as it was. "Well, like I've said, I'm pretty practiced in dealing with the uncanny. There's not much at this point that I wouldn't be able to handle."

A quiet noise of fascination tweeted from Loki's chest. While most of the human race was out toiling to further their meaningless, little, materialized lives, here was Pepper Potts doing that and taking care of a multi-billion dollar enterprise and its wayward armored quasi-hero. Indeed one of the most genuine creatures he'd come across in his many wanderings. Steve Rogers might have been a close second. Curious things.

"That's very optimistic of you," he stated.

"Well, life's a bit better looking on the bright side, I've found."

Loki watched her, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. Occasionally, it seemed to dawn on her what it was exactly that she was doing. The apprehension widened her eyes a little, but she made no remarks, and so, neither did Loki. Now was one of those times. He could have tipped the scales, said or done something to cement the underlying fear or whatever it was she held for him. But he didn't. "I believe that makes me want to vomit," he quipped, taking a swig from his glass.

"You have a problem with optimism?" Pepper asked, incredulity staining her voice like a happy accident.

"I have a problem with people blinding themselves to reality, Miss Potts."

"If it helps them get by, then why not?"

"So they don't see the end coming until it happens, and by then there's nothing to do about it?" He scoffed. "Or sit back and wait for a quick fix to their oh-so unfortunate situation? Incredibly foolish."

Pepper actually laughed. Loki turned a squinty glare in her direction, but it didn't faze her.

"I'm not sure what's more unbelievable," she started, "the fact that I'm talking with a Norse god over martinis or that you're actually giving me a straight word." Her last word half drowned in the dregs of her drink as she finished it.

Loki paused, fixing her with a searching look. Was she right? Odin's beard, that encounter with his mot- Frigga must have rattled him a bit more than he thought. He caught both lips between his a teeth a moment, searching now for something in the bottom of glass apart from the orange peel. When he didn't find it, he laughed. It was much too loud. He turned in his seat to face her, holding his drink aloft.

"Miss Potts, you are a rare woman," he declared. She winced slightly.

"You know, the last man who said that to me ended up being fried by an overloaded arc reactor."

Loki's eyebrows edged towards his hairline. "…And I am disarmed by your frankness."

"No, you're just being an ironically polite ass."

His smile flashed. Oh, she was catching on quick. "Spoken like a true friend of Tony Stark." He drained his own drink.

"Hey, I resent that."

Both of them looked to the doorway to find Tony standing there, arms crossed and mouth forming a sour frown on his goatee'd face like a storm over Las Vegas. He laid judging eyes on Pepper, who was holding a hand over her mouth to smother one of her polite little laughs. "You're drinking with Loki," Tony deadpanned. "You remember he's not on the cool team, right?"

Stark's sarcasm formed a thin veil over the supreme dislike he felt towards the smirking god at the kitchen table. Loki only cackled. "Never fear, Mr. Stark. Miss Potts is in no danger under my watch."

"Really? You're about as dangerous as nipples on a breastplate." There was a beat of blessed silence. So it was down to insults now, was it? Stark continued. "Did you like that? I figured you'd get it, being familiar with the whole armor and swords thing." Loki met Stark's dark eyes over the kitchen island.

"Then you'll 'get it' when I say you're about as useful as your security system in keeping out assassins."

Stark did that twirling thing with his hand that he did whenever giving honest praise or saying something dismissive. It was dismissive in this case. "Okay, your opinion on my security system is moot, all right? You can't tell me the first thing about human technology."

"I can tell you, though, that this building was supposed to be the most secure thing in New York. Now, Mr. Stark, that has been proven to be a bold-faced lie."

"Well, you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?" And then Stark aimed both pointer fingers at him like two pistols. "I believe I'll coin that term Loki'd." He paused, and then a self-appreciating smile erased the frown marks in his forehead. "I like it."

"Ironic, even," Pepper added. Stark spared the first and only genuine smile Loki had ever seen on the man for the straw-berry blond standing next to the sink.

"Knew you were still on my side." He held out an ostentatious hand to her, which she crossed the kitchen to take. To Loki, "And by the way, we're going to start addressing that little security problem you're so inconvenienced by tomorrow morning. Get your notes together."

And with that, the two humans turned and left. Once more, Loki waited for the tell-tale ping of the elevator to echo down the hallways before he moved; it was violent. The martini glass shattered easily against the metal of the fridge.

He had to get out of here.

-A-

The helmet stared him down from across the kitchen table, like its owner's head sat there spearing him with his eyes. Justin Hammer stared right back, head tilted to the side and his arms crossed over his chest. His foot tapped on the floor.

He knew whose helmet this was. He'd seen the Youtube videos of Stuttgart and the blurry pictures on the news of the green-caped crusader who had attacked Earth. The horns were unmistakable. This was the helmet of the God of Chaos, the Liesmith: Loki.

For an inanimate object, the helmet possessed an air of malice that no doubt suited its owner. Justin leaned forward and squinted at it. The thing was dusty but surprisingly dent-free. He had found it in a pile of building rubble and there was barely even a scratch.

As a weapons engineer and something of a scientist, Justin did not subscribe to the whole magic thing. This helmet, though, and the entire escapade with Loki and the Avengers (that reeked of Tony Stark, by the way) had opened his eyes a little bit. There was definitely intelligent life out there. Justin reached across the table to pull the helmet closer. It hummed at his touch and he seemed to hear something like a whisper across his mind, a disembodied laugh that made him glance around. No scratches…there was something valuable about this helmet. It had to be more than just protective headgear. Chromium, perhaps, or a coating of it maybe? Surely it had some kind of supernatural property, not that he'd know how to use its powers.

Justin smiled his little sideways smile, flicking one of the horns. It rang pleasantly. "I'll find a use for you, little friend," he said, picking it up and turning it over in his hands. It was surprisingly light and the inside was padded with leather and felt. He lifted it as if to put it on, but a chill passed over him and his hands were suddenly sweating. "Maybe another time," he muttered, setting it back down.

The hands on his watch read ten-thirty. Damn. _Workaholics_ was on Comedy Central. With one last look at the helmet, Justin got up, retrieved a cup of coffee from the Italian-made espresso machine next to the fridge and wandered out into the living room. He turned the light in the kitchen off as he went, but even the dust coating the helmet couldn't keep away a gleam of gold in the moonlight slanting in through the French doors.

…

AN: Ok, so less action, more talk. Again, bear with me. Frigga showing up and the end were about the biggest things to happen here, but I got to nine pages and it needed to end, namely with (WHOA) Justin Hammer. Pepper's also one of my favorite supporting characters, obviously, so if I get obnoxious about it, please let me know.

Is it all too much? My brain keeps coming up with neat things which I automatically stick in, but they may be more appropriate as stand-alone type things. I also can't plan humor. The funny here, if it's actually here and I'm not under some delusion, wrote itself and was a fortunate accident. I credit the verb 'to Loki' to MTv and their little stint with Tom Hiddleston. Go find that video.

I'll shut up now. We'll get back to the action next chapter. Thoughts, gripes, complaints?


	7. The Interlude

"Do I annoy you, Heimdall?"

The brusque, commanding voice rolled over Heimdall's shoulder. He didn't turn his head to look. "Why would you ask that, my prince? I am your watchful servant," the guard replied.

Thor stepped up to the shattered edge of the bridge, peering past the jagged points and tears to perhaps try and decipher what lay beyond where the waters of Asgard fell into eternity. Heimdall could see the red of his cape in his periphery.

"You are my father's servant, not mine."

"One day, then, perhaps."

"Perhaps…" Thor's voice was distant. His gaze leveled, narrow and pensive; it was a look Heimdall had seen many times, though rarely in Thor's eyes and more so in Odin's. The recent events on Earth had forced Thor to grow up all at once. Was he still arrogant? Yes. Bull-headed? Yes. But it did not drive him to rash action so much as it did in earlier times.

The fair-haired prince sighed through his nose. "I ask because I find my thoughts far away from Asgard, and you are the only who can answer my questions. The entire court notices. Father has commented on it."

"You're presence does not trouble me, Thor. I know the burdens you carry and will not begrudge your means of easing them."

Thor's smile, as always, was easy and lifted some of the clouds thundering on his brow. "You are a good friend, Heimdall."

The guard allowed only the slightest of smiles to turn up his mouth. "Now, who occupies your thoughts this day, my prince?"

Storm clouds returned to Thor's expression. "There is little that does not occupy my thoughts in recent days. The Jotuns continue to press with their demands, which leads my thoughts to my…brother." Thor's tone communicated the clear cut conflict raging in his heart, the hesitation before the familial title indicative of his doubts. "I know he is in the safe hands of my friends, but I do not know if my friends are safe near _his_." Thor paced back and forth four times before he spoke again, fingers drumming on Mjolnir's handle at his belt. "And that in turn creates concern for Earth and those who live on it, particularly Jane Foster."

The thunder god's head tilted forward, not quite downtrodden but less than determined. "But the root of my troubles may very well lie in the fact that I cannot go dashing off to rectify things. The Allfather is doing all he can to keep the Jotuns from going for our throats and Loki's head, and my place is at his side. My father's side."

Heimdall could understand Thor's plight. Since the near destruction of their realm and the death of their king, the Jotuns had been howling for blood, particularly that of the criminal who had instigated the whole thing – Loki. Their reigning leader, a Frost Giant regrettably named Utgard-Loki, had been back and forth from Asgard to Jotunheim in negotiations with Odin.

Thor had broken the bridge in time to save the realm from complete annihilation, but it wasn't enough before several hundred Jotuns had perished in the energy beam and tremendous amounts of structural damage occurred. Utgard-Loki surprised them all by being something of a magician himself, and almost immediately after the strike, had appeared before Heimdall on the bridge of his own accord, howling and blustering and promising war the likes of which they'd never seen. The ability to travel with the Tesseract or Ice Casket made Thor wonder if the Jotun was of Laufey's line, like his brother, but decided not to ask.

There was another matter, Loki's heritage. Small wonder he had nearly gone berserk over the news, what with the Frost Giants more or less being the mortal enemies of Asgard and the threats and stories of battles and the terror of war common knowledge amongst its citizens. Thor couldn't relate, as much as he tried to understand. He couldn't imagine what must have gone through Loki's head.

"I feel myself spinning in circles, pulled in many directions."

Heimdall nodded slightly. "Such is the plight of lords and kings. Their success oft lies in what they place first in their hearts, but they sacrifice much to such success."

"This I am learning," Thor admitted, unable to keep the reluctant resignation out of his voice.

"Earth has its champions, Thor, and I keep it in my sight. See to your station. Trust your Avengers to do their job, and do yours in turn."

"In truth, it should be you in my place and I in yours."

"I fear I haven't the patience for court politics."

Thor's laugh was loud and raucous, the slap on Heimdall's back friendly. "I think I am beginning to see your sense of humor, my friend!"

Heimdall allowed only the slightest of amused smiles turn up the corners of his mouth.

**..A..**

"You kept a hand?"

Tony Stark looked up at Pepper's slightly disgusted question, pausing as he opened the cooler. "SHIELD was surprisingly fast in claiming the body…" He shot a pointed look at Romanoff, who looked right back at him. "So, no thanks to you, I needed a way to get DNA to put in the scanner I'm working on."

"That's …revolting," Pepper said with a grimace. Stark shrugged, looking somewhat put upon.

"Hey, desperate times."

They gathered in Stark's personal section of the research and development floor. No need to startle employees with the news that the company had been infiltrated by the same aliens that had attacked their home barely a fortnight ago. With the lid off, Tony, Pepper, and Natasha all leaned forward a little expectantly to look inside. There wasn't much to see beyond the ice. Stark reached for a box under the table and pulled out a couple rubber gloves. He pulled them on with a flourish, letting the elastic snap to his skin. "Well, let's see what makes these guys tick," he stated.

Unfortunately, when he reached into the cooler with a rubber gloved hand, a relatively disgusting squelching sound was the result. His hand retreated, now covered in a grey, gelatinous substance. The smell wasn't pleasant either. Pepper recoiled, covering her nose with a hand. Romanoff and Stark just grimaced.

Standing about half a head higher than the three of them, Loki leaned over the cooler to look inside. He had tried to find the least colorful articles of clothing he had been loaned and halfway succeeded – a periwinkle blue button up shirt he'd rolled the sleeves up on and black trousers. They worked surprisingly well with his boots. He cleared his throat lightly. "I seem to recall something about the Chitauri, the shapeshifters in particular…" He stuck a long finger into the cooler and was rewarded with the grey jelly clinging to the tip of his finger. He held it to the light a second before flicking it off onto the floor. "They decay, uh, rather quickly. No, they don't lose appearance in death, but it appears that without a conscious will to hold the form together, the body loses direction, and decays into nothing down to the…what's the term? Ah, molecular level." He paused, glancing at the three humans. "I believe the Other likened it to a defense mechanism to keep the identity of a particular assassin, or of the Chitauri race itself, anonymous."

An irritated silence followed the end of his statement.

"So _this_-" Stark held his gooey glove up. "-is useless."

Loki waited a beat. "Absolutely. It makes sense. No need to give the game away."

"And you couldn't have mentioned this earlier?"

The god's shoulders twitched upwards in a shrug. "Nobody asked. I figured after watching the damnable thing's DNA decay on your sampling device from yesterday, that you'd see the futility."

"Test it."

Natasha Romanoff's stern contralto speared through the conversation. Stark nodded. "I think I agree."

Loki only shook his head, laughing somewhat. Stark caught the motion and pointed an accusing, jelly-coated finger at him. "Don't even look surprised, Greensleeves." He meandered over to some technological contraption that Loki couldn't identify and stuck his hand into a green laser grid projected above a flat glass screen.

"You people seem to forget that it's my well-being at risk here, as well. If I could profit by tricking you and giving you false information about the Chitauri, I would," Loki replied easily, resting a hip against the examination table. He turned an ironic eye on Romanoff and scoffed. "And you were the one pushing for trust in the first place. Spies are incapable of trust."

Romanoff apparently didn't see it fit to give a response. She politely ignored him, as cool as ever. Loki watched her for a second. It only took that long before the urge to push buttons, so to speak, won over his reserve.

"Oh, but wait. I forget myself. You seem to make an exception for Agent Barton."

The name must have registered in Romanoff's mind; she blinked, a nearly invisible movement he only caught from being an experienced reader of faces. Right on target. "No trust from love, though. Love is for children, if I remember correctly." He crossed his arms. "How is the Hawk, by the by? He seemed a bit...on edge last I saw him. Why, it must take something dreadfully disconcerting to shake his _iron will_."

When she spoke, her voice was only a trifle harsh. "Stark, what did the machine say?"

Stark was rolling his gloves inside out and depositing them in an incendiary device on the other side of the lab. "As much as it pains me to say, Loki's right. That hand, or what used to be a hand, has basically just turned into Jello."

"Good luck using technology alone to detect them," Loki sniped, pushing off the table to meander around the lab. "If anything, feel vindicated that your SHIELD allies are now in possession of about two dozen gallons of gelatinous and decidedly useless Chitauri remains instead of a whole body." He paused to watch meaningless numbers crawl across a crystal display showing a diagram of the base of the tower, where the arc reactor pulsed like a heart.

Stark shrugged, about as placated as a thwarted genius could be. "I guess that's true," he muttered. "There has to be at least something, though."

"You might use somebody who studies human faces and body language," Loki mused, still watching the screen. A lovely mental image of an overloaded arc reactor blowing out the base of Stark's little tower played through his mind. "When I was accosted by the assassin masquerading as Happy Hogan, his visage wasn't quite right. Like he didn't fit into his skin."

Still watching Loki like the god was a dangerous animal, Stark nodded absently. "They are aliens," he conceded. "And that little debacle you call an invasion was first contact. It'll take them some time to get the hang of us." He chewed the inside of his cheek. "Personal information for a cross check maybe." At this point, he was merely thinking aloud, the cogs of his admittedly sharp mind turning.

"Kinesics we can do. SHIELD has some experts," Romanoff added. "It's more down to what do we do with one if we get it."

"We _kill it_, Agent Romanoff," Loki said bluntly, wandering now to the next display. "What else do you do with an assassin or invader? We know why they're here, so there is little to gain from interrogation. I figured you of all people could place that as the only viable option."

Pepper finally came back into the conversation, still eyeing the cooler. "Wouldn't that just incite further conflict with the Chitauri, though?" she asked.

"That won't matter. They've already started moving in." Loki's eye caught the displays of Stark's armor iterations lined up against the far wall in their glass cases. "And they won't be a threat on the conventional scale, particularly since Stark decimated the bulk of their fleet. It's down to the few wrenches in the machine, if you will, to set things awry. Then they make themselves seen." He smiled. "It's a bit too subtle for the Chitauri mind in my opinion. I wouldn't be surprised if Thanos took things into his own hands after the fleet was destroyed."

"I'm sorry, who?" Stark seemed genuinely confused. Loki turned from a screen showing several online videos simultaneously. A number of them were news clips.

"Thanos."

"Is he their leader?"

"He's not Chitauri, if you must know, but…," Loki began, turning his wrist experimentally. It clicked once, but there was no pain. "Leader, dictator, controller, one would not be more appropriate than the other."

This seemed to concern the humans. Not surprising; anyone with half a brain could think about it and realize that it was indeed a little disturbing to find out that the enemy you thought was in charge, a rather dangerous and already difficult enemy to being with, actually wasn't in charge. He laughed at their faces, a hooting laugh he enjoyed a little too much. "Don't get upset. I wouldn't discount the Titan, but I wouldn't place him as a priority at the moment," he said dismissively, laughter still evident in his voice. "Just keep him in mind. I may even help you when the time comes and his wroth descends down upon this little dirt ball you call a planet. As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm not exactly his favorite."

"Yeah, thanks for the offer," Stark said absently, frowning.

"But, we know his game, at least," Romanoff said, stepping up to put the lid back on the cooler. "Is there anything else we could know about the Chitauri?"

A recording of a star-spangled figure in red, white, and blue duking it out with another figure in green and gold in a dark plaza filled with frightened people played in the top right corner. The quality was grainy, likely a cell phone video, and taken from about a waist-high vantage point by somebody crouching off to the side, out of the way and under cover of a bush near the plaza. Loki was quiet a moment, watching the video, before he answered.

"The grunts were drones. The shapeshifters are smarter and not part of the hivemind Stark destroyed. They'll start catching on quick to your movements, your habits until the transformation is seamless. Therefore, you'll have to start building a defense now. As much as you may want to avoid startling the majority of your employees, you'll have to control those who come in and out."

"I think I know how to run my company, thanks. You just give us the information," Stark cut in, bent over a holographic display. "For the physical triggers, though… are there any dead giveaways we could look for?"

"Oh, I beg your pardon, Master Stark," Loki retorted, rolling his eyes. He picked up a cube made up of tiny metal spheres and toyed with it idly between his hands. The spheres were magnetic, he found. "I didn't get much interaction with the assassin, but it seemed to speak a bit heavily, drawing out _S_'s in particular and subtle _R_'s, much like your British accent tends to do. They have six fingers in their original forms, so there may be an effect on coordination, overreaching and what not."

Pepper made an exasperated noise at the buzz of her mobile phone. "Well, as much as I enjoy standing around, I do have some things to take care of, so have fun with the alien bits." Shaking her head, she turned on one heel and headed out of the lab.

"Bye, dear! I'll tell you all about it later!" Stark called after her.

"It sounds like you've had a lot of time to observe these things," Romanoff stated, hefting the cooler off the table and making for the incendiary device to dispose of it.

"I've spent enough time with them for a lifetime,' Loki replied, stifling a yawn. He squeezed the cube, disrupting its shape and set it back down, a mangled mass of little metal spheres now delightfully unorganized.

"Why?" Stark seemed a touch incredulous. "They didn't seem like the best conversationalists."

"Means to an end," Loki replied, wandering again until he found a transparent tablet within reach. "I was not above learning from them."

"Huh. That's a strange thing hearing out of your mouth, you not being above something else."

"Do not confuse a desire for knowledge for respect. For example, I could learn a number of things from the human race." He held aloft the table as an example, running a finger across the screen to successfully navigate from one glittering display to the next. "But that does not mean I will consider you an equal."

As he spoke, Stark crossed the lab towards him and pulled the tablet away from him like a parent removing something fragile from the hands of a child. "I've heard from Thor just how technologically advanced you Asgardians are. I can't image what life is like without a toaster."

Loki frowned. "I don't think I appreciate your tone, Mr. Stark. In Asgard, I don't _need_ a toaster when I can do most anything with the flick of a wrist."

Stark didn't look at him when he spoke, only fiddling with the tablet, likely to make sure Loki hadn't messed anything up. "Oh right. A regular Hogwarts, I'd wager. A real shame, though, that you have to use the toaster now. Must be the worst."

Loki's frown turned into a scowl. He had considered mastering human technology to be relatively easy, but then he would imagine Thor trying to muddle his way through the waffle maker. The popular culture references, though? He was about as ignorant as Steve Rogers was to them; on the off chance he watched the television, it was either History or the Discovery Channel. And Stark took advantage of it as often as possible. What was a Hogwarts?

He forced a short laugh, though, opting to tear a little bit more at his already unraveling thread of patience. "At least I can work the toaster. Can you? Or is that another thing you have Miss Potts do?"

"I can make my own toast, thank you very much."

"I'm surprised you tie your own shoes," Loki muttered in response. At this point, his rebellious feet had turned his wanderings towards where Stark returned to orchestrate his way through the holographic display. The man's eyes darted from diagnostics to the three dimensional figures suspended in the air.

"You know, I don't think I'm going to continue engaging you in conversation. You get dull when you're sulky."

The look Loki shot him through the green hologram would have curdled milk, but Stark seemed to ignore it. Loki didn't answer, though. He tucked his hands behind his back, watching Stark work a moment. He hadn't the slightest idea what the thing was supposed to be, but he could admire the ease with which the man worked. It did indeed look like he was conducting an orchestra, albeit with an eccentric flourish now and again. The curiosity must have shown on his face.

"It's a facial scanner. A dummy check in addition to whatever human expert we may have on hand," Stark said suddenly. For once he managed to not sound condescending. He tilted his head over his shoulder, twisting at the waist to look at Romanoff. She leaned against one of the many desks in the room, arms crossed and watching the two men with an almost bored twist to her mouth. "What do you think?"

Here was Loki's chance.

"Works for me," she replied simply.

Before Stark turned around, Loki stuck a finger straight into the center of the hologram, scattering the pieces of the virtual scanner into a 3D explosion and zooming it out past the point of minute detail Stark's fingers had been tweaking. He kept his hand there until Stark's head swung back around, and he took in the sight. With eyes on him, Loki then swept his finger up at a forty-five degree angle, minimizing the display all together. He clasped his hands behind his back, expression neutral, eyebrows raised in the slightest of question.

The human was disturbingly quiet for a good moment before his eyes narrowed. "Did you mother ever use the expression _do not touch, or I'll break off your fingers and make you eat them_?"

"My …mother was royalty. She wouldn't use such a crass threat of violence on a child."

Stark placed his hands on the edge of the projector, leaning forward on them. "Well, then it's a good thing I'm not your mother."

"I'd have to go throw myself off your balcony if that were the case."

"_Khoroshyee gore_, will you two just punch each other and get it out of your systems. This passive aggressive stuff gets really old." Loki and Stark looked at Romanoff. She stared back at them, one eyebrow arched impressively over one eye and hip out at angle that clearly communicated annoyance.

"Shouldn't you be tracking down Chitauri among my employees, Agent Romanoff?" Stark asked suddenly.

"Actually, Pepper asked me to make sure you guys didn't kill each other."

"Oh. Well, if that's the case…"

Loki caught the movement out of the corner of his eye only a split second before Stark's fist materialized through the hologram and connected with his chin. He took a step back in surprise as much as from the strike, head snapping around to spear Stark with his eyes through the hologram.

The dark-haired genius stared right back at him, shaking out his hand.

"Do you think you're making an entirely wise decision, Mr. Stark?" Loki asked, voice low and dangerous.

Stark made a face. "I'm not really known for making wise decisions, Mr. Laufeyson."

The reply would have been something along the lines of "Then it's a good thing that neither am I," but the demigod forewent that to vault over the projector and bodily tackle Stark to the floor and proceed to visit violence upon Tony Stark's smarmy, goatee'd visage.

Fighting had always been a game of strategy for the similarly minded Loki. He did not possess the same physical strength as his fellow warriors, preferring to duck and dodge and delude. This usually had to happen, as their opponents tended to be giants or dwarves or other various monsters. He was a frost giant himself, but he was admittedly and woefully undersized and fairly ignorant of his own natural-born abilities apart from an affinity with magic. Here, though…Here he was almost a giant. He stood taller than any of the Avengers, save Thor, in addition to the average majority of the human race. He was stronger, faster, smarter.

And that allowed him a certain advantage, not to mention the opportunity to throw himself into mindlessly beating something with his fists, something rare and new he hadn't particularly experienced in much of a capacity. He wasn't stepping out of boundaries, and he wasn't planning on killing Stark yet. Not to mention, Romanoff didn't care and Stark started it in the first place. So, he let go of logic and strategy a bit and wasn't cognizant of the slightly victorious, sharp and vengeful smile lighting up his features like the glow of a will-o'-the-wisp.

Stark was fast, though, and fought dirty. Advantage passed from one party to the other for about four or five iterations before Loki, gritting his teeth through a bloody nose, managed to get Stark into a rear naked choke and began to tighten down on the man's diaphragm. Stark's face turned an alarming shade of beet red before he tapped out, pounding on Loki's arm with one hand while waving defeat with the other.

Both fell apart, one gasping and coughing significantly more than the other. Loki kicked Stark's more or less dead weight away from him and got to his feet. The exertion had split his or rather, Stark's shirt across the shoulders, and somebody's blood was smeared down the front in a red line that cut diagonally across his chest like a bandolier, but he straightened it nonetheless, assuming a dignified stance with his chin up and shoulders back.

It took Stark a minute to get to his feet, massaging his throat to get the blood flow back to his head. When he did, he almost mirrored Loki's stance. The two men eyed each other uneasily a moment. Surprisingly, Loki did feel less like killing Stark. He hadn't expected Stark to be able to fight back without his suit. And Stark seemed to watch him with a grudging admittance that he was more than just a blustering foe with a magic scepter.

"You're fast," Loki stated blandly.

"You can actually fight without magic," Stark replied, wiping a bit of blood from his bottom lip.

"People tend to forget that."

"I bet they do. Feel better?"

"Surprisingly so. You?"

"Not really, but I'm good for the day, at least."

As much as Loki hated the Avengers, he did have to give them credit for defeating him. Revenge would still be sweet, though.

Romanoff cut between them, walked across the lab and halted at the door, turning to wait for Loki. "Finally. We have a plan and if you don't have anything else to contribute other than a glib tongue, then I'm taking you back to your suite."

"Well, if I have no other choice." Smarm and sarcastic resignation crept back into Loki's tone. "Have a lovely evening, Mr. Stark."

"Have fun taking apart the blender or something," Stark replied, already returning to his work station.

He hadn't thought about the blender. An amused snort escaped Loki's nose. "I'm sure I will."

...

**AN**:*Google translate told me this was Russian for "good grief."

Somebody's being a little peevish, I do realize this. Maybe it's a little out of character, but he's out of place here. I liken the situation to Norrington and his resignation during _Dead Man's Chest_ – displaced, disgraced, defeated, slightly self-destructive and with an obvious tendency towards internal criticism. The similarities just about end there, but correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm also not a Marvel expert, so forgive me a little creative license with the characters I happen to hijack for my plot purposes and the technicalities of magic, Chitauri biology and Frost Giants.

Obscure word of the day: cacestogenous – adj., caused by an unfavorable home environment


	8. The Hammer Strikes Back

The speakers on the laptop could not do justice to any sort of music, but the rolling melody that opened Rachmaninov's _Piano Concerto No. 2_ was no less dramatic. Music was fitful on Asgard, limited for the most part to lutes and bards with bright tenors who sang songs of heroes and great deeds. Loki remembered Stuttgart and how the delicate and tranquil musicians in the corner had provided a composed contrast to the chaos he inflicted upon those assembled. Breaking the relatively peaceful assembly had been all the more enjoyable with a musical accompaniment.

Reclining easily in a chair near the wide window in the sitting room and with his feet propped up on the glass coffee table, Loki watched the multicolored visual effects in the media player on the laptop. He rested two fingers idly against his lips, head tilted to the side. That internet phenomenon of endless link-following took hold of him and led him down a trail that had started at elevator blueprints and was now at Russian piano composers of the late 19th century, more specifically, Sergey Rachmaninov.

With vast amounts of information at his fingertips, curiosity got the better of him, and he only noticed the passage of time when the concerto ended and silence flooded back through the guest suite. He glanced at his shadow on the carpet, making a disappointed face at the sudden and inevitable mundaneness of the world assaulting his senses. He idly snapped the laptop shut and plopped it onto the floor next to his chair.

The past several hours had not been a waste, though. He had learned some about elevators and wiring with the intent of either sabotaging or controlling the one that stopped at his floor. Pepper might have considered that optimistic; Loki considered it an experiment. If it didn't work, he figured he may have to resort to something underhanded to gain access to the rest of the building, like perhaps guilt Pepper into letting him tag along somewhere.

Laying pain upon Tony Stark had indeed helped his outlook considerably. The more chaos courted his fancy, the easier and more satisfying destructive outlets came to be. The urge to disassemble was still there; given that the property and possessions around him belonged to his enemies, that would likely never go away. At least now, though, he could quiet the ragings of his own mind to keep focus.

He was dressed in one of Stark's slightly less obnoxious shirts today – completely silver this time, some asinine design sown down the left side in black thread. At least it didn't change colors with the lighting. His mind was far from his dress, though. He retrieved the laptop from the floor and made for the kitchen. After plugging it in to charge, he snagged the screwdriver and a knife from a drawer and headed out into the hallway.

The screws in the plating over the buttons were no match for the screwdriver; the knife was for the wires. Unfortunately, the second the plate touched the floor, the elevator dinged and the doors opened. He whipped around, knife over his shoulder at the ready.

Natasha Romanoff stepped out and gave him a quick once-over with her eyes. "A bit jumpy this morning?" she asked coolly. It was a borderline statement that almost made Loki frown. He left his expression on neutral, body returning to the same state.

"It would be foolish to drop one's guard given the situation," he replied. A beat of silence followed, likely only long enough for Romanoff to determine if he was making a threat; he was. His patience wore thin by the minute anymore, and lone, single fibers were all that stood in the way of snapping. He allowed a relatively harmless smile to cross his face. "Now, how _ever_ may I be of service to you, Agent Romanoff?"

One of the things he found interesting about Romanoff was how her true expression tended towards neutral almost all the time. It would just ever so slightly deviate in one direction or the other, indicative in the minute movements of her eyes or the tiny quirk of her mouth or eyebrows. She was a cool professional, able to act out emotion, but never truly show it. She was set at neutral now, eyebrows level, mouth turned down just ever so slightly at the corners, eyes half-lidded.

"Stark wants you in the lab. He's finished the scanner."

"And he wants me to see it?" Even Loki couldn't keep the incredulity out of his voice.

"Well, with you being so good at masking your emotions, he figured you'd be a pretty good way to test it out."

He flashed a predatory smile. "I'm flattered. By all means, lead the way."

Lead she did. He saw her eyes dart to the gaping hole in the wall next to the elevator but made no comment as she pressed the button to open the doors and stepped inside. Loki followed and with him a sudden tension that filled the tiny space to the point of suffocation.

They hadn't been this close since the day he had departed Central Park with Thor. The image of her leaning in to whisper something derogatory into Barton's ear, something no doubt insulting and demeaning, fluttered through Loki's head. He tucked his hands behind his back, eyes tilted down. There wasn't a six inch glass wall between them anymore, only tiny molecules of air that offered less resistance than tissue paper. Her stance – hands held loosely together before her, shoulders relaxed – would have indicated to anybody else that she stood at ease with no fear.

To him, though, she was trying too hard. Her guard was absolutely up and made ten foot thick concrete walls around her. Her eyes purposefully stayed away from him. Not necessarily a bad thing, he figured. Revenge was screaming through a part of his mind like a banshee, but he reasoned out that Romanoff did not deserve being throttled or subjected to mindless violence. He held a certain grudging respect for her. Not many people could sneak up on him or better him in the battle of wits, but she had and, for it, deserved something different.

The elevator came to a halt before he had time to start visualizing that something, and they stepped out into Stark's lab. The open space diluted the tension, and both of them returned to consummate professionals.

Stark leaned over a table, running his fingers in conscious movements over the glossy surface of a flat black device, not dissimilar to what the human race called 'the iPad.'

Loki spoke first. "I understand that you wish for me to test your scanning invention," he stated.

"You understand correctly," Stark replied, looking up at them finally. He pointed to a chair across the table from him. "Sit there for a minute."

He did so, leaning back and crossing his arms. Stark finished whatever calibrations he needed to make and held the device up. It was sleek and sophisticated, much like most of the contraptions of Stark origins. The screen appeared transparent from Loki's perspective, but it was clearly one-way by the way Stark continued making adjustments on his side. "Okay. The main function is to determine human versus nonhuman, but it has other applications, as well, lie detection being one of them. It worked on me, and as much as I'd like it to be true, I'm not the master. We need this to be as sensitive as possible, particularly since the Chitauri will likely be adapting as we speak, if they're worth anything at all."

He paused and finally looked at Loki. "So give me your best lie. I mean, I'll know you're lying, but the scanner won't. Just go."

Loki mused for a moment and then leaned forward, keeping his expression at absolute neutral. "Your shirts are delightfully conservative, much like your personality."

Stark's glare found him through the scanner. His mouth tightened before he spoke. "Guess you're a lot better than I gave you credit for…" he muttered, lowering the scanner and poking the screen, making adjustments.

"You might say I invented the process," Loki replied.

"Entirely possible, given your no doubt advanced age."

"Indeed."

Stark held the scanner aloft again, pointing it at him. "Less insult, this time, please."

And so this process continued for two or three more times, each time the scanner failing to pick up the lie. On one hand, Loki was pleased that he had still maintained the upper hand. On the other though, if an assassin perfected its appearance and mannerisms, it would still be able to dupe the scanner by lying about information that had no significance to it other than maintaining the disguise.

Stark picked up on this, as well. "Maybe lie about something related to home? I bet that'd be hard to do, particularly for you, problem child."

Loki moved to give some scathing reply, but Stark's attention darted away suddenly; his eyes settled on Romanoff. About halfway through the test, Romanoff's hand had flown suddenly to her ear, no doubt to listen better to the comm device there. Just as he finished, she abruptly pivoted on one heel and vacated the lab.

Loki was intrigued, as well. Romanoff was nothing if not deliberate. Sudden movement from her dictated something was happening.

Not a second after she left, Jarvis's voice came to them from the intercom. "Mr. Stark, I'm afraid I have some bad news."

"What now, Jarvis?" Stark's tone was slightly irritated. "If it's worse than finding out there's an alien superpower poised to invade Earth through subterfuge using shapeshifters that we can't detect, then just shoot me now."

Jarvis, for all his programming and decidedly inhuman nature, actually paused. Loki imagined if the AI had a face, it would be wincing. "…Not quite so bad, sir, but still rather unpleasant, if it's not too bold."

Stark gestured impatiently for Jarvis to continue. Somehow the AI saw it. "Justin Hammer has bullied his way through security, sir, and he has …an entourage with him."

"Jarivs, can you clarify that for me?"

"To be entirely honest, sir, it would be a waste of time."

Jarvis's point was proven about four seconds later. Natasha Romanoff's voice came leaping down the hallway, sharpening suddenly when the door to the lab opened and in waltzed Justin Hammer. Romanoff followed like an auburn shadow, fury clouding her green eyes. Hammer and Romanoff argued, Hammer looking much more confident than the tiny spy trying to hinder him like the personal assistant she pretended to be. In their wake followed five large, suited individuals with average faces, mundane expressions, and sunglasses.

Trying to be inconspicuous did not come easily for Loki, but he did his best, leaning back casually in his chair and hooking an arm over the back.

Justin Hammer. He didn't know anything about Hammer apart from the lone mention of his name on Stark's Wikipedia page. An arms dealer and weapons engineer. He had had an altercation with Stark that led to some million dollars in damage and malfunctioning drones and some other nonsensical business that only vengeful humans would go about. The man lacked finesse, and Loki could see that plain as day as he strutted into Stark's lab like a gaudy Aesir noble with a mind to win the whole court, leaving a trail of sleaze across the floor.

"Wow! Justin!" Stark declared, his voice only half serious. He spread his hands out, smiling a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "I didn't expect to see you out so soon. Did you have a fun time with SHIELD?"

Hammer stopped about ten feet from Stark, leaning his head back and crossing his arms. "The food was fantastic. Can't say much about the company, though." He made an exaggerated gesture with an elbow towards Romanoff.

Stark shrugged, and for all the world they looked to be two men complaining over a common inconvenience. "I know, just can't get rid of those guys." His hands came together with a clap, all business. "Now, kindly turn yourself and your monkey suits around and get out of my lab. You're trespassing."

The weapons designer winced. "That I can't do, Anthony, I really can't." The suited men fanned out a little behind him. Loki narrowed his eyes, watching them. Hammer pinpointed him, though, pointing at him like he was a newly acquired piece of equipment. "Oh, who's this? I don't think we've been acquainted."

Stark spoke before Loki. "He's just an incredibly distant cousin of mine from the UK. Lawrence Macavoy." Loki didn't look British in the slightest; foreign, perhaps, but not exactly British.

A genuinely amused smile creasing his nose, Loki rose from his seat, crossed the room and extended a hand to Hammer. The gesture was in itself so human that Loki fought and nearly lost against a slightly revolted shudder. "How do you do?" he said. Hammer looked tickled pink, reaching out to take Loki's offered hand.

"Quite well, thanks. I didn't realize Tony had any cousins." Hammer very obviously began visually comparing the two; their hair color was about the only thing they had in common.

"_Very_ distant, his mother's side, you see." He turned an appraising eye on Stark. To the man's credit, he actually smiled back. "Heard all about his exploits all the way in London and decided to pop over for a visit and get to know the other side of the family."

Stark walked over and took Loki by surprise when he clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. "Yeah, I keep joking he's just here to capitalize on my brilliant successes against evil and weapons engineers with out-of-date glasses," he said, his tone and endearing smile belying the meaning behind his words. Loki barked out a laugh, putting his own arm on Stark's shoulder and violently fighting the urge to belt the man in the back of the head.

"Aw, that's cute, guys, really," Hammer said. "If I didn't know any better, that little improvisation would have convinced me."

Stark didn't miss a beat. "What do you mean, Justin? I love my cousin. We have the same taste in clothes and everything." Loki twitched, his hand opening and closing once, but his smile stayed on. Hammer only shook his head, a sad smile on his face. He pointed at the suited men.

"You see, these guys are from the _FBI_." Condescension ran off Hammer's voice in rivulets. Stark feigned shock. Loki tried not to look annoyed. "And they know who he really is."

"Lawrence…" Loki had to hand it to Stark; he was indeed good at acting. Loki glanced down at him to find Stark staring back at him, looking terribly earnest. "What are you not telling me?"

"I honestly don't know what you're talking about," Loki replied, looking back at Hammer. He kept up the farce just for fun at this point. From the grin starting to spread across Hammer's face, the man knew more than he was letting on.

"Come on, you can't fool me, Mr. Laufeyson. You're obviously from a much heartier stock of man than Mr. Stark here, and I'm pretty sure this whole house arrest thing just isn't workin' for ya." He pointed at the feds. "Let's just –"

Hammer's sentence met its end abruptly at the end of Loki's fist. The man surprisingly maintained his footing even as he staggered backwards, clutching his nose. Loki disengaged from Stark by elbowing him in the side, but he maintained a cool composure and fixed his own icy glare of disdain on Hammer. "Don't pretend to know me, Mr. Hammer. I find it offensive."

Stark, for all his negative feelings toward Loki, seemed to appreciate seeing Justin Hammer punched in the nose.

Hammer made a couple noises of pain, bent almost double. "_Wow_, you've got a hell of punch there, tiger," he said through watery eyes. "Anthony, restrain your friend here, please. I don't know why he's here walking around free in your lab, anyway."

Stark did a brave thing by grabbing Loki's bicep with a surprisingly strong grip before the god could take a rapid step forward to visit thorough violence upon the smarmy weapons engineer. Hammer didn't know when to quit, but had he seen the murderous look in Loki's eyes, he might have thought twice.

"Just get to the point, Justin," Stark said. "What the hell are you doing in my tower?"

Hammer was able to look up finally, wiping the water from eyes. "Well, the good people of New York deserve a bit of justice, Tony, and I mean visible justice, not just the word of some cape-wearing god figure that he'll get it back home. You're here housing a wanted intergalactic fugitive, while the rest of us are left to clean up the mess." He spread his hands out like a beggar, expression comically contrite, particularly with the water still streaming from his eyes. "Where's the justice in that, huh?"

"I know it's difficult, but try to get your head around the fact that this is a bit above your station," Stark replied. He released Loki's arm to step forward and gently turn Hammer towards the door.

Loki took a long breath in and out through his nose and he took a half step back. His hands opened and closed at his sides. His mind darted back and forth between fury and restraint. Hammer was a small man; it wouldn't take much to break him, but calling the greater attention of the human race to himself would be a poor choice regardless of the potential therapeutic qualities that lay in beating the stuffing out of something.

He was a prince, damnit. Prince of what exactly he couldn't wholly say. Even so, he was still the son of a king either way you cut it and that warranted a great deal more respect than the paltry showing of civility that he had met so far. People seemed to forget that he representedchaos, and chaos was feared. Why else would civilizations organize but to avoid chaos? Oh, the day when he could publically and unequivocally achieve vengeance and reemphasize just how much power chaos held over the universe would be a sweet day indeed. He almost thought it a shame that that day was not today.

Hammer had halted Stark, a forceful hand on the other man's shoulder. "I have the senate on my side, Tony. Senator Stern is leading the charge." His hand lifted to point at Loki with an outstretched finger. "He's going to be taken into custody, I'm tellin' you."

"What about SHIELD, huh? They're running this show. It's their rules we're following 'cause that's what the department is made for! And I'm pretty sure Nick Fury would be delighted to have you over for supper again so soon for illegally detaining a political prisoner seeking asylum. It doesn't even explain how you even got access to my tower or how you even knew he was here."

Hammer executed a cartoony version of a shrug, exaggerated and obnoxious. "Maybe there's a mole here, Tony. You have your secrets, and I have mine. Now stand aside while the boys here do what they do best." The man actually shoved Stark backwards, and one of the suited men pulled a gun and leveled it at him.

Romanoff broke into the conversation. "SHIELD's jurisdiction is the only one that applies to this kind of situation, Hammer," she said. "The FBI has no power here."

Hammer was unimpressed. He whipped out some manner of badge from his jacket, flashed it, and then returned it just as quickly. "SHIELD doesn't run the country, sweetheart. The people do, and this is for them," he replied, pointing again at Loki with a flourish. The suited men swept around him like a wave and made directly for Loki.

The only thing running through Loki's mind was the image of hounds snapping at his heels. This man Hammer endeavored to take him out into public where any lurking Chitauri could ambush and kill him before his pathetic human guards could do a single thing. The confines of the tower were stifling and he chafed at the presence of his enemies, but at least he knew the layout. Being taken out and paraded like an effigy destined to burn was a bit detrimental to his plans.

He smirked, bemused slightly at a sudden realization that hopped into his mind.

Chaos, the double-edged sword.

He let the first man get just within arm's reach before he moved. The strike was swift like a snake bite, catching the agent unawares and snapping his head back. Then his palms slammed together, the man's head caught between them. Loki felt eardrums pop against his palms. He did not possess Thor's god-like strength but what he lacked in power, he made up for in speed.

As the first agent dropped, the second one rose up to replace him. He blocked a poorly executed haymaker only to have the third agent stomp on the back of his left knee. Loki went down hard on that knee, grabbed the foot aiming for his chest and twisted it. The response was a snarl of pain. The second agent rotated and Loki was moving before the man hit the floor, sweeping upwards towards the third agent.

About a split second before his hand connected with the man's hasty block, Loki felt a sharp and sudden sting above his left shoulder blade. He ignored it long enough to stomp on the third agent's instep, recover from a punch to the jaw, dance backwards and take advantage of the man's momentum to trip him and throw him to the ground.

He turned to find the other agent when a second sting, this one accompanied by the tap of impact, thudded into his chest. His hand found the culprit projectile and pulled it out before he looked down at it. A silver, red-feathered dart lay in his hand. He looked up to find the other agent lowering a wide-barreled gun.

Hammer's voice cut into his attention.

"Hah, what are you made of? That's quality tranquilizer right there, and you're still standing after _two_."

Loki laughed. "Is it common practice to treat a prisoner like a wild animal?"

"Well…it is a little unorthodox."

By the time Hammer finished speaking, the effects of the tranquilizer started to smudge the edges of Loki's vision. He blinked owlishly once or twice, tossing the dart in his hand away and reaching over his shoulder to find the other one. The feeling reminded him strongly of the time he and Thor had gotten into Asgard's mead stores when they were very young. Had that been him? Maybe not.

The third dart landed just below his collar bone.

The world started tilting a little, forcing Loki back down to one knee. Somewhere beyond his consciousness, he could hear himself laughing as he pulled the dart out and tossed it aside. He would have to learn a bit more about human poison and chemicals after this. They had fairly practical uses when magic wasn't an option.

At some point, somebody came behind him and hooked his wrists into cuffs while somebody else stood in front of him and propped him up. The voices of Stark, Hammer, and Romanoff sounded eons away, and Loki's mind had gone blessedly blank. Two people hauled him to his feet and started for the door. The transition from the lab to exiting the building was incredibly fuzzy, but the light outside created for him a moment of clarity.

The afternoon sun shone bright and unassuming overhead, heating up the black body of a nondescript car with chrome hubcaps parked next to the tower. Another man in a suit stood at the back door and held it open as Loki's captors dragged him forward. A dull rumble of noise, people noise, coiled around the corner of the building, but he couldn't place where or what caused it.

The moment ended when they tossed him unceremoniously into the back seat, and the last thing he saw was a bag going over his head followed by an unwelcome and unpleasant oblivion.

...

**AN**: Hey all, I just really wanted to apologize for the awful delays. Please bear with me; the past few weeks have been insane. I don't like making excuses, but like I said, a bunch of stuff here was on fire, I was pulling incredibly stressful 20 hour days every other day which I'm finally starting to recover from, and I have to send chapters to somebody else to post them for me. I do very much intend to finish this little plot, but as much as I want to say that updates will be regular again soon, I can't make promises. To everybody who's sticking around and dealing with the crazy, thank you and you have no idea how much I appreciate it. If you happened to peace out because reasons, I'm sorry I let you down.

Dispensing now with my long-winded excuses, let me know if I just ruined my pacing by bringing Justin back in so soon. It was either jump the gun or drag it out unnecessarily.

I'll start aiming for once a week-ish updates, though. Here's hoping!


	9. The Capture

When Bruce Banner got out of the taxi at Stark Tower, he wasn't quite sure what to think. Maybe it was a common occurrence for reporters and cameras to be gathered outside the New York residence of Tony Stark, particularly after the incident with Loki. The Avengers were still being tossed around news networks like hot potatoes, some debating on the legality, others praising their intervention. It was all the same to Bruce, really. He wasn't the poster child or the team leader, and he was okay with that. He didn't figure the nation wanted an essentially uncontrollable monster leading the team of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" anyway.

The whole deal had pulled him away from his work in Calcutta, so he had been long overdue for a visit to see how his patients were doing. He had left several people whom he had taught personally in charge of the small endemic running through the community and was pleased to return to find that most had recovered and those still ill were in the process of healing.

Finding himself not needed anymore, Bruce wandered back to Stark Tower. At least there he could stir up something of an intellectual nature with Tony. He lingered on the sidewalk, though. He wasn't really sure if he wanted to cut through the crowd at the door. The taxi pulled away, and Bruce leaned over to pick up his suitcase, coat draped over one arm. One reporter glanced his way, but upon seeing a slightly disheveled but mundane looking man in ill-fitting clothes, turned back to the door.

The people assembled grew louder all of a sudden, training their cameras and microphones on the door. Four people emerged from the building. One was being supported between two and the last made up the rear. It was the last one that the reporters focused on, clammering for quotes and what-not.

Surprisingly, it wasn't Tony – some short guy with coifed hair and square-rimmed glasses who worked the cameras in a way that really wasn't dissimilar from Tony. Idly, he looked to see who was being escorted to the black Cadillac idling on the street, but when he caught sight of the man's face between the heads of the reporters, Bruce broke into a cold sweat.

He watched, open-mouthed, as two men in suits shoved Loki Laufeyson into the back of the car. Panic rose in his chest as the other guy took notice, a rumbling in his gut making the corners of his vision turn black. Shaking his head to clear the anger, he made speedily for the door. He was within arm's reach of pushing the closest cameraman out of his way when a scream sounded and explosion knocked them off their feet.

Bruce rebounded off somebody and stayed standing. When he turned to view the street, chaos erupted around them. The Cadillac was at a full stop in the middle of the street about fifty yards away, and it was coated in flames. Hovering above it in all its horrifying alien glory was a Chitauri assault ship.

Foregoing his breathing techniques, Bruce knew what he had to do. He hurried to the edge of the sidewalk, green replacing the black cutting into his vision when covering fire shattered the concrete in front of him.

The ground was unkind and knocked the wind out of him when he landed. Control wavered between him and the other guy when he managed to get himself into a sitting position. When he looked again at the car, two Chitauri had rappelled onto the wreckage in spite of the flames and ripped a hole in the roof. Between the two of them, they reached into the back seat and dragged out a struggling figure.

Loki.

The god fought against the grip, hitting, kicking, but it wasn't enough. The aliens hung onto their ropes and were pulled back up to the ship, Loki caught between like an insect. Why wasn't he using magic? Were the Chitauri not his allies?

_What was going on?_

Bruce rolled to his feet as the Chitauri ship whirled away and fled, the bullets of nearby policemen following it in its wake. Leaving his suitcase and the disorder on the street, he made for the door. Tony had to know what was going on; they had just dragged Loki out of _his _tower after all.

He ran into Pepper Potts in the foyer, trying to contain the panic rising amongst the employees on the ground floor. "Dr. Banner!" she shouted, grabbing his arm. Her eyes took him in, concern furrowing her brow. "Were you just out there?"

"Yeah, I just got in," he replied. "What's going on? Where's Tony?" Employees flowed around them like a sweaty, anxious tide.

"He spotted the drop ship and went to go suit up."

"I don't think he's gonna have much luck. They just booked it outta here like a bat outta hell."

"The suit's got scanners and—" She stopped speaking abruptly when Bruce took her gently by the shoulders.

"Pepper, why was _Loki_ getting into that car?"

Pepper was silent for a moment, mouth hanging slightly open. Her eyes darted around the room a moment before she found her voice again. She gripped his forearms, resignation making her look sad and rueful. "It's a long story, Bruce. Head to the lab, I'll meet you there when I finish with damage control. No doubt the press is going to be all over this place if I don't get the doors closed. I'm sorry."

Bruce nodded, mouth a firm line. He let her go and she whirled away, shouting things. His heartbeat had slowed back to its normal pace at this point, and the other guy had retreated to puzzle over things in his simple way. Bruce had some puzzles of his own to figure out, but Pepper had the missing pieces. Chewing his lip, he wandered outside and retrieved his bag and coat.

A pool of indifferent calm in a sea of manic activity, he weaved his way back inside and over to the secure elevator where he swiped his personal key card. The doors dinged open and he stepped inside.

Leave it to Tony to have AC/DC as elevator music. The lab was conspicuously quiet though when the elevator stopped there. Sighing, he deposited his things at a nearby desk and set to looking at the various displays. Tony wouldn't mind if he looked around to see the state of things.

His walk around the lab took only a couple minutes. Nothing terribly new. Some armor modifications. The Mark VII armor was gone, no doubt being used at the moment. The arc reactor showed normal.

The device on the table was new, though. He thought it may have been iPad at first, but then remembered that Tony made all of his own tech and had compared just how laughably behind him most software companies were. Bruce picked it up and the display reactivated. It was one way and the middle stayed clear, the margins softly glowing green. A simple design; two commands were at the top right and left of the screen – record and analyze.

Some kind of scanner, for what he didn't know. Another question to ask, then. Sighing again, he set it back down on the table and made for a chair to wait. He snagged a mutilated Bucky Balls desk toy on the way, reorganizing them as he sat down.

It proved to be enough of a time waster for Tony to get back. The mechanical workings of the tower reassembled the armor from the landing pad in its usual place on the far side of the lab. Tony followed several minutes later, grumbling about some 'elf in a cheap suit with delusions of grandeur.' Pepper was with him.

Bruce set aside the Bucky Balls and figured he'd wait for Tony's angry tirade to stop before speaking up.

"I told Fury this was a bad idea. I _told_ him."

"Yes, I know." Pepper's tone was weary and frustrated.

"How the hell did Hammer find out? I know for a fact he doesn't have anything in his arsenal that's that good at breaking into security feeds. ...Or does he?" Tony made straight for the table and the device sitting there, taking a brief second to look up at Bruce as he walked by. "Oh hey, Bruce." He snagged the scanner off the table and continued. Bruce lifted a hand in hello. Tony continued ranting, waving the scanner irately. "Now we look like we've been harboring a fugitive!"

"Well, technically…"

"No, this was totally legal. SHIELD authorized Stark Tower as his place of asylum, detainment, whatever, and the last time I checked, they were still part of the government. Don't let anybody from the press in. Have people go look in the corners and the trashcans to make sure there isn't anybody from CNN or something hiding there with a mic. Jarvis!"

Bruce leaned back in his chair, an amused smile creasing his care-worn face. Tony Stark in the midst of a creative break-through was a sight to behold; Tony Stark on damage control should have been the eighth wonder of the world. The man moved back and forth across the lab, all at once deliberate and frenzied as he snapped orders at Jarvis, argued with Pepper, and made rude comments about Loki and somebody named Justin Hammer.

When it ended, Tony halted at the table, planting both hands on it and leaning his weight against them. A frown twisted at his brow, pulled his mouth into a wry shape. He chewed on his lip a moment, eyes flicking at Pepper then Bruce before tilting down at the tabletop.

"Are you done?" Bruce asked, genuinely curious as to the answer. Still frowning, Tony nodded. "Good. Now, somebody please explain to me what just happened. I'm a little concerned that I can't leave for a few weeks and come back to relative peace and quiet." It would have been funnier if he hadn't really meant it. "I thought Loki was in Asgard."

Pepper's sigh pulled his attention to her. She stood next to the table, arms crossed and one hip set at an angle from her body. Her face was considerably calmer than Tony's. "He was. Apparently Odin thought it appropriate to strip him of his powers and toss him back on Earth to get a taste of his own medicine. I shared a taxi unwittingly with him the night Odin banished him. The Chitauri are out for his head from the whole invasion failure, so Earth is both his prison and his asylum in a way."

Tony continued. "And Nick Fury thought it prudent to keep him here. You know, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Things were pretty hunky-dory for a bit. The Chitauri are apparently good at shapeshifting, some of them, so one got in using Happy's face and tried to kill him. Bygones being bygones, we were working on a facial recognition scanner to try and screen for more assassins and infiltrators, buuuuut…."

Pepper interrupted him before he could embark on another rant. "Buuuuut, then Justin Hammer bullied one of the security guards into keying him onto the secure elevator with a mind to deliver Loki into the hands of the American justice system. He had a badge or a warrant or something and five men from the FBI."

"Who's Justin Hammer?"

"Just a squirrely little nobody who caused that whole meltdown at the Stark Expo last year," Tony more or less snarled. Bruce remembered hearing about that even half a world away.

Pepper nodded. "I called the police on him and it earned him some quality time with SHIELD. No doubt he was extremely proud of himself for throwing a wrench in the works."

"And now Loki's been snatched up by the Chitauri for them to what they want with him," Bruce finished. Tony and Pepper nodded.

"That is, unless it wasn't some planned attempt to spring him out of our hands," Tony grumbled. Bruce shook his head.

"No, I was out there on the sidewalk when they pulled him out. He definitely wasn't going very quietly, even if he did look a bit weak."

"And he wouldn't have tried to help us with the scanner if he didn't have a vested interest in it," Pepper added.

All three fell silent. Bruce dipped his head, twiddling his thumbs as his mind worked. "Well, this isn't exactly an ideal situation."

"Nope," Tony said. "Romanoff's already on the line with SHIELD, and I know for a fact that Fury's gonna be even more irritable than he usually is when he finds out."

"True," Bruce conceded. "But what about Thor? I assume he knows what's going on?"

Tony and Pepper shared a look. Some manner of telepathic communication that only they could understand occurred in two gestures – Tony inclined his head to her and Pepper responded by looking at the floor. Tony turned back to Bruce, leaning against the table on his elbows now.

"We assume so."

"What's he gonna say when he finds out that his brother's been snatched up to be tortured or whatever?"

Another beat of silence that Tony broke by tapping his fist on the table top and wincing. "Damn good question, Brucey. We don't know."

-A-

Sound crept into his ears, the soft noises of an empty room trapped in the midst of the walls and other rooms around it. Full consciousness would not follow, and his limbs stayed frustratingly immobile. His eyes wouldn't even open, but behind them disjointed images and memories whirled like the waters of the Kerlauger. All Loki could do was lay there and take it, helpless against the clumsy and drugged ministrations of his mind.

Some unknown period of time passed after that first sound, but sensation started flowing up from his fingertips into his arms. He opened his eyes, and the world around him stayed blessedly stable. In spite of the lead still trying weigh down his arms and drag at his eyelids, he pushed himself into a sitting position.

He was in an average looking room – white walls and ceiling, tiled floors. There was a table with what looked like a television on the far side of the room; it was low and box-shaped, unlike Stark's many plasma screens, but must be a television nonetheless. Other than the rickety cot he sat on, it was the only other piece of furniture. And no windows. He made a sour face. Another cell. At least he was still in the same clothes.

He swung his legs over the edge of the cot, rubbing at his eyes with the heel of one hand. In one respect, he might be slightly appreciative of Hammer's kidnapping. It did get him away from the Avengers and their associates. In the other, though, the man was unbelievably annoying and had probably put him in a greater position to be killed. And he had been insulting.

The list of things stacked against Hammer grew with the ire rising in Loki's chest. There was little upon which to release that ire, though, and none as satisfying as Hammer himself. When the man would appear was unknown, but Loki did possess patience of a sort. So he rested his elbows on his knees, laced his fingers, and waited.

As he waited, he plotted. Many things depended on his immediate future – death or eternal imprisonment at the hands of Midgard. No doubt Heimdall had seen recent events transpire, so Thor, at the very least, would _have _to butt in at some point, as would S.H.I.E.L.D. and any other person, animal, or thing that had suffered or profited at his hands. In the various television programs he had explored, several had been about the lengthy and oft-times controversial trials of criminals against humanity. There would be those crying for blood, those who wanted justice but equal fairness, those that would even question the right for humanity to try such a creature as he, and lastly, those who would only chase the proceedings armed with a camera and a gross disregard for privacy.

Perhaps he overpowered his guards. Maybe the door, closed now, could be broken. It would be off into the night with nary a thing Justin Hammer or Tony Stark or S.H.I.E.L.D. could do about it. It would also mean that the Chitauri could be lurking around a corner waiting for him to walk by before sticking one of those wicked needles in between his ribs. He still didn't know what they tracked him with. Maybe they had his helmet and the vision he'd had of it sitting in the rain was really a symbol of its status.

Even so, he much preferred the thought of fighting on his own terms rather than being trapped and forced to wait for his executioner. In the end, maybe it really didn't matter. He forced a hissing breath through his teeth. Many things had been disproven to him, his entire childhood and identity being the most recent. Could the same happen with Ragnarok?

A knock on the door disrupted what would have been a full-blown reevaluation of the cosmos, one of many and not the last. The silence that followed the knock made him roll his eyes wearily. "Enter," he said sharply.

The tousled and spectacled head of Justin Hammer poked into the room. "Mind if I come in for a moment?" he asked, all welcoming smile and camaraderie. Loki found it relatively offensive.

"I don't see a problem with it," he replied. It would get the man within choking reach.

"Excellent," Hammer said, stepping into the room and closing the door behind him. He was wearing a white cotton suit with a cornflower blue shirt underneath, no tie. As he crossed the room towards Loki, Hammer gestured to the surroundings. "I'll admit it's not the coziest of rooms, but it's what we could do on short notice."

Loki only stared at him, eyes partly narrowed and the corners of his mouth turned down slightly. Hammer stared back a moment before clearing his throat nervously. "I also want to apologize for the… brusque manner of your detainment. It was a necessary evil."

"Necessary for what exactly?"

The speed of the question seemed to take Hammer off guard. "Boy, you get right to the point when you want to, don't you?" He paced idly for a moment, hands clasped behind his back when he suddenly stopped. "I could just tell you, but I have a better idea."

Without another word, Hammer nearly skipped over to the television. He pulled out a small square object, something Loki identified as a 'cassette tape,' stuck the tape into a larger version of itself and then jammed into a slot on the front of the television. Hammer looked over his shoulder at Loki, grinning. "Watch this. It's pretty cool." The screen fizzled to life when he hit the power button, and almost immediately the voice of a news reporter came through the speakers.

"_Authorities are still puzzling over the events that transpired today at Stark Tower during the detainment of intergalactic criminal, Loki of Asgard…_"

Intrigued, Loki got up from the cot and walked closer, watching the screen in fascination as a news reel showed Hammer and two of his suits walking out of Stark Tower, surrounded by reporters with cameras and microphones.

He leaned closer, baffled.

There, handcuffed and being dragged between the two suited men, was an exact facsimile of himself. It struggled now and again, obviously under the effects of some kind of drug. He knew it was a fake because, regardless of his mental condition, Loki had seen the very obvious lack of people around the particular car the armed men had put him in. The camera recording it flicked back to Hammer just as the suits shoved him into a car identical to the one he himself had seen.

Hammer, being the natural grand-stander he was, spewed some dribble about justice and laws and the suffering of the innocent people harmed in the invasion, but the monologue was interrupted by an explosion and the screaming of people. The camera whizzed back to the street where the car had started pulling away.

Instead of it driving securely away, flanked by the police cruisers nearby, the vehicle was a molten, smoldering wreck in the middle of the road, flames licking hungrily around it. Overhead, a Chitauri assault vehicle dipped low, and two aliens leapt off the craft and onto the wreckage. As they did, the ship peppered the sidewalk with blasts of energy. It sent the people gathered scattering. Together, they reached into the fiery wreck and pulled a smoking, struggling figure out – Loki.

Two rappelling lines shot out from the assault craft and hooked to the Chitauri. It then hauled them back up to the vehicle, which shot off and away over the buildings. The crack of the guns carried by the nearby policemen followed them. All the while, the human reporters were either running in terror or standing their ground to get footage, speaking hurriedly into their microphones. Hammer's shouting tenor came up every once in a while. The camera footage halted when a bystander blundered into the cameraman, and the two people and device crashed to the ground, ending the show in a blast of static.

The main news reporter came back on screen, but Hammer muted the man's voice and turned to gauge Loki's reaction.

Throughout the clip, Loki's curious expression had morphed slowly and terribly into a fascinated smile. A quiet laugh made its way up from his toes and out his mouth, growing in volume enough for a few very audible chuckles to echo in the room. He was still smiling slightly when Hammer turned down the volume.

"Well?" Hammer asked, obviously very proud of the whole debacle.

"That's very clever, Mr. Hammer," Loki conceded, crossing his arms over his chest and putting a thoughtful finger to his lips. The events that had transpired some hours ago certainly put an interesting twist on things. It definitely made things easier…provided it was indeed what it seemed.

"The world thinks you're either dead or have been sprung loose by the Chitauri," Hammer said, putting his hands in his pockets. "Either way, it's pretty fortunate for you 'cause…well, shoot, you're off the radar. Not to mention, it's kind of freaked out the human race that there's still aliens here."

Loki's eyes flicked towards Hammer. The man stood at ease, watching him right back with that cheesy, slightly inane grin on his face. "Whatcha thinkin'? Are thanks in order maybe?" Hammer asked.

He was terribly good at filling silence, this human. In reality, though, Loki did not trust Hammer nearly as far as he could likely throw him, and it wasn't just because he had tried to shut Tony Stark in the past. Being a creature of deceit, Loki wasn't about to trust anybody but himself. He could trust in actions; those were predictable based on the individual's personality and mindset, both of which he could manipulate. What he did know what that Hammer, while smart for human standards, tended to bumble a bit, and he doubted the authenticity of what had just occurred on the camera.

"The doppelganger was impressive. How did you manage that?"

A simple question, but not the one Hammer must have expected. "Uh…Well, that's the one little hitch with your golden opportunity here..."

All amusement dropped from Loki's face as his hands fell to his sides. Hammer had entered what Loki rapidly came to recognize as his condescending, plausible deniability stance; he was about to deliver some bad news, likely some that profited Hammer and Hammer alone.

The sudden change in Loki's demeanor made Hammer almost take a step back. "You see… I've made some new friends recently, mainly because I found something of yours."

Fire and damnation, Loki knew exactly what Hammer had found. "My helmet."

"Yeah, and apparently, that's how they've tried to track you. It's only been slightly successful, as you know."

Double damnation. Loki's eyes narrowed and if he could have spontaneously set fire to the smarmy little man standing before him, he would have.

"You're not saying…?"

Hammer winced. "'Fraid so, pal. The Chitauri are pret-ty mad about the whole –"

The man didn't get through his sentence before Loki rushed him, snatched him up by the throat and the front of his suit, and tossed him to the floor. Stunned, Hammer couldn't even fight back as Loki stood over him and bent down to place his palm against the man's forehead and force it against the floor. "You're a very conniving little human, and your scheming has put me into something of situation. I do so tire of your race's delusion that you may meddle in the affairs of gods!" He grabbed the front of Hammer's suit again and hauled him to his feet to the point where his obnoxious shoes dangled a half inch from the floor. "The Chitauri move fast, but I'm much faster. I may not be able to escape them, but they won't be able to get to me in time to save _you_. When I get through with you, Justin Hammer, there won't be enough remains left to scrap up and put in a coffin for your funeral."

Through the hand on his throat, Hammer sputtered something. Loki turned an ear to him. "What was that? I didn't quite catch what you tried to say."

This time Hammer made himself a little more intelligible. "You don't have to worry about the Chitauri!"

Loki actually laughed. It made his grip loosen slightly, and Hammer's toes touched the floor once more. "Excuse me?"

"I said you don't have to worry about them. We worked out a deal." He cleared his throat, coughing slightly. "They help me take down Tony Stark and I get them you, but they don't get you until they carry out their end of the deal. They can't get in here. The door's coded, and I'm the only one who knows the password."

"And when might they complete their end of the deal?" Loki asked, not convinced.

"However long it takes them to infiltrate Stark Industries, SHIELD, and whatever the heck else The Other wants to poke its sticky fingers in," Hammer said in a rush. Loki fully set him down now, but kept his hands wrapped in Hammer's suit in case something else came out of the man's mouth that irked him. Hammer was shaking and his voice was tremulous and quiet. "I mean…it'll help that we ousted Stark for keeping you under wraps, but…"

"That still could be a lot of time."

Hammer managed a shaky smile, patting Loki's forearm like he was touching a venomous snake. "My…my thoughts exactly. And I do like Earth the way it is. It's my favorite planet, and all my things are here."

Loki studied the man at the end of his reach, a wry almost-smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "Is this an alliance you're trying to facilitate, Mr. Hammer?" Hammer did not relax, but he maintained a nervous smile.

"Well, I figure we've got some things in common, revenge being foremost among those."

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the saying goes?" Loki replied, setting Hammer back down on his feet and smoothing out the wrinkles in his jacket. Hammer held up his hands, taking a half step back from Loki.

"I…_friend _is such a strong term."

"Good. I don't have friends."

**AN:** WHOA. I got real close to writing myself into a corner here and writing on the fly as I do, I had to take a couple days to knock some holes in the wall, so to speak. Got on a roll the other night, though, so the majority of this was written in a few hours.

But, you guys. Your reviews, favorites, and following for the past two chapters make my day every time, so I've done my best to keep up the quality control. You really don't know how much I appreciate your understanding. As always, let me know what you think!


	10. The First Step

AN: Haha, got you. Thought I was gonna disappear for good, huh?

Again, distractions and business abound, and once more, the dread beast of academics has risen from the shadow of the summer to take a sledgehammer to my free time. In the mess, I lost all track of where I was going to go here, so I had to back track and bit and the bash my head against the keyboard to get it done. I apologize for any issues in quality and the shortness; a transition chapter plus a sporadic muse/time makes for a difficult thing.

Anyway, enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think!

**Chapter 10: The First Step**

It was the voice in the night that woke him from a dead sleep. It was the niggling sensation in the back of his mind. It filled his chest with fizzing anxiety and made his hands itch with impatience.

Above all, it was within reach, but he just. Could. Not. Get. To it.

Once left alone by Hammer, Loki found the lone surveillance camera with ease and wondered idly who was sitting on the other end, watching a half-baked god twiddle away the hours. Hammer trusted him enough to try and forge a deal, but not so much as to be left unsupervised. At the moment, though, he sat on the end of the cot, elbows resting on his knees, chin in hand, and eyes watching a thousand miles away. The casual observer might look at him and assume his stillness was due to peace of mind or intense focus.

Not entirely true.

Every muscle in his lean body coiled tight like snakes in the cold. He took a breath every few seconds, a short and slightly violent inhale-exhale that was nearly invisible beneath his shirt.

Had he been at full strength with every cosmic power in his arsenal under his command, his gaze alone could have frozen solid the next living thing to enter his awareness.

The 'it' in question was his helmet. Apparently even Odin couldn't snatch away every thread of magic potential in him; it was too much a part of his body and soul to be whisked away with a wave of the hand.

Was it an enchanted helmet? No armor would be worth anything if it wasn't. Could it fly and talk and other such things? Certainly not. Loki had no need for anything more than an average albeit slightly embellished helmet with one or two useful strength charms and reflective properties. He didn't need a Mjolnir to hold his own.

But it was still magical all the same, and even more importantly, it was _his_. Everything Loki owned, his armor in particular, held just a smidge of himself, like a signature or watermark. On a clear day, he could track that helmet from realms away. In spite of not being able to pinpoint it now, Loki could feel its magical properties pooling outwards, an aura that crackled against his fingertips and raised the hair on his neck. Pining melancholy ached in his chest, tugging on his heart strings, and for the first time since Odin banished him, Loki felt regret.

The feeling alone reminded him just how much he was like an empty vessel, an empty cup that nobody would use. Spurred by the touch, Loki had tried some simple spells – a conjured flame, a puff of smoke – but to no avail. There just wasn't enough emanating from the helmet to bolster the weak and spindly thread of power eking its way around his body like a refugee.

He had put his foot through the TV in frustration. So he gave up for the time being to try and meditate the fury away. This proved impossible; the helmet wouldn't leave him be. And so, there he sat, at the edge of the coat, a rapidly ticking time bomb being driven up the wall by his own battle equipment.

Running his bottom lip between his teeth, Loki stood abruptly and started pacing. Justin Hammer was particularly lucky that his wayward prisoner was indeed rather helpless, or he might have regretted cutting a deal even with the Chitauri in the first place. He needed a way out. Being shifted from one prison to another was inefficient.

And he did tire of being dragged places he didn't want to go.

The locks on the door clicked. Loki's eyes darted abruptly upwards.

Speak of the devil and he shall come.

Hammer appeared once again, his effervescent smile entering the room before he did. He did not seem to sense Loki's unease. This was probably for the best. The door shut with a click behind him. "How's it going, champ? Figured I'd stop by and see how things were…going…" Midway through his sentence, Hammer noticed the wreck of a television on the floor. He glanced back at Loki, who merely returned the look with one of utter innocence. "So…yeah…"

"Lovely to see you again, Mr. Hammer," Loki said suddenly, approaching the man to put a friendly hand on his shoulder. A plan began to manifest itself in his mind. "I really must thank you for being so attentive a host as you are."

Hammer watched Loki's hand out of the corner of his eye like it was a snake but managed a smile all the same. "Not at all. It's really the least I can do, with the enemy at the door and everything."

"To be absolutely assured. Although…" Loki drew away, putting a pensive finger to his lips. "You mentioning the enemy at the door has me thinking. What's to stop your…wayward allies from merely overpowering you when their patience runs out?"

"When their patience runs out? The deal depends on how timely their success is, not anything I do."

"Yes, but I'm not sure you entirely realize just how adamant The Other and Thanos have been in their attempts to either kill me or bring me unto their fell hands." One hand put itself on Hammer's shoulder while the other pointed at the door. "Those _beings_ out there only follow orders. If The Other or any other higher ranking Chitauri gets an order out to cut you out as the middle man, then there's little to stop them apart from your relatively incompetent body guards."

Hammer looked to the door, brow furrowed. Loki could practically see the man subscribing to his words. It was a manipulative feeling of success that only Loki, as a trickster, could appreciate. Hiding a predatory smile was easy.

"Naturally, I'm concerned for my own well-being, but they'll roll right over you, likely pull that door code from you through torture, and then all will be for naught. Earth would…"

"Ok, you make a valid point," Hammer said hurriedly. He sidestepped from under Loki's hand.

There it was. Loki's eyes narrowed slightly, the only external evidence of his inner sense of victory. The seed of doubt, doubt that, contrary to his belief, Hammer was hardly the one in charge.

"Their commander or whatever has been hinting…not so subtly, mind you…that their shapeshifters can adapt surprisingly fast."

"It seems as if they're trying to tell you that you won't hold power for very long," Loki supplied, tucking his hands into the small of his back and meandering to the cot. Hammer seemed to relax slightly at the increased distance. He looked at Loki a moment, swinging his hands forward once to pound a fist into the open palm of the opposite hand. "Perhaps your hold over them is offensive to the…powers that be, if you will."

Hammer shrugged, pulling a face. "Probably. But I still retain a degree of control here. It is my facility after all, and I've learned a few lessons the hard way about this sort of thing."

"I can imagine."

Hammer nodded sagely. "Right. So, here's what I'm thinking." He set his feet apart slightly in a stance that made his meager frame seem larger, and spread his hands in suggestion. "What do you say we get you out of here and somewhere with a little class...I appreciate your thanks, but come on. This is like Guantanamo Bay compared to where you could be… and then later, we can chat about getting you back on top?"

Let him talk long enough and Justin Hammer could be quite convincing, as far as the genuineness of his words went. Flattery towards those he wanted to do what he wanted seemed to be the preferred method of getting people to do what he wanted. Loki wondered if he wrote out his conversations and practiced them. He did have to give the man credit, though. He was very convincing.

"You flatter me, Mr. Hammer. Compared to other ventures, my needs are quite provincial; however I really can't come up with a reason not to follow you on this little escapade into your modern culture." Loki's smile was almost amiable. His mind had already begun to toy with idea of possibly a bit of freedom outside the confines of a room.

Hammer's own flashy smile preceded his answer. "Exactly the answer I was looking for."

Loki maintained his light smirk, the slightest glint of his teeth showing.

"Perfect."

...

As it turned out, Hammer's facility was one of his weapons development warehouses. A pair of armed guards escorted Loki and Hammer out of the building. He assured Loki that the men weren't Chitauri and he wasn't walking him to a torture chamber or anything.

They passed through an open floor at one point. It was cluttered with alien equipment now and, disconcertingly, Chitauri. The majority looked to be drones, trundling about with hovercarts of oblong black boxes or taking a blow torch to a disabled skirmish craft. One or two of them paused to track his movement. Intermingled here and there were different ones of a lighter build and with less of a stooping crouch. The fluorescent lighting angled off the red knives at their waists. Loki made note of them; they were the shapeshifters.

One of them stopped and watched him the longest. The focus in its stare caught his attention even through the veil over its eyes. It wore the same equipment as the other shapeshifters, but the way it seemed to hold reign over the entire floor from its location on a balcony overhead indicated its leadership. Hammer noticed Loki looking back and leaned in to talk quietly to him.

"That's …well, I can't really pronounce his name, but we just refer to him as The Voice, mainly since he keeps saying things like, 'I speak with The Other's voice,' and blah, blah, blah. The Other delegated the whole escapade to him."

"I can't say as I've had the pleasure," Loki replied, keeping his gaze level and cool on the Chitauri leader.

"Not something I'd regret," Hammer muttered. "I definitely don't get any kind of pleasure from speaking with him."

Their journey to yet another nondescript black human vehicle parked outside occurred without further incident. A wave of New York City heat rolled over them as they stepped outside, but the air conditioning in the car mitigated any unpleasant affects. Looking around, Loki couldn't place exactly where they were, but the open space flooded his senses and, all of a sudden, he didn't feel so on edge.

Hammer opened the door for him and then maneuvered around to the other side and got in. One of the guards got in the front passenger seat and shook hands with the driver. The other jogged to the driver's side of another car parked behind the first. Hammer leaned back in his seat and propped an elbow on the window jamb.

Loki watched them pull away from the building, the car rolling forward smoothly as the driver bid it. They were quite faster than horses, these cars, but much less efficient than teleporting. Given the circumstances, however, he didn't mind. Watching through the tinted window, Loki determined that they were on the outskirts and headed now back into the city.

On the other side of the car, Hammer pulled out a handheld device and began poking it with a stylus. "Now, given all that's happened, you're a pretty familiar face at this point. It'd be suicide to try and waltz around without at least giving you some kind of local color…"

Loki looked at him, sitting back slightly. An amusing colloquialism, not beyond his understand, but he asked anyway. "Local color?"

Hammer nodded. "Yeah. You know, make you at least look a little less…" The man looked back, seeing a sharp-faced physical embodiment of lies and evil with a flare of long and not-very-subtle black hair. His mouth wrinkled slightly. "Uh, would you be entirely against getting a haircut?"

...

"-employees knew nothing of the criminal being sheltered in their midst. Most have resigned from their posts. Tony Stark continues to refuse interviews. Back to you in the station, Mark."

Pepper turned off the news with a sigh, casting an eye over the increasingly unorganized pile of papers gathering on her desk. Complaints, resignation letters, interview requests, newspapers, you name it. The fallout from Justin Hammer's ambush a day and a half ago turned into a disaster. Stocks were falling. Anti-Avenger politicians and protesters renewed their attacks on the team. A small army of reporters camped outside the tower at all hours of the day to try and get comments or incriminating photos. In all, not a great situation.

She let her head rest in her hands with a groan for a moment before turning to her computer. Google was open; the search topic was 'Norse Mythology.'

After thinking on it, Pepper realized she really didn't know much about it. The little she did know outside of academic knowledge was what Tony had explained to her about the feud between Thor and Loki; they weren't really brothers. Loki had been 'adopted' in a way, had suffered because of it, and now held a god-sized grudge against his older brother and family.

The only problem was that she wasn't sure how accurate Earth's myths were compared to the real story. Most of Earth's myths claimed that Laufey was Loki's mother and that he was supposed to be tied up with a snake dripping venom over his head as punishment for causing the death of Thor's other half-brother Balder. Clearly there was some sort of disconnect.

She didn't notice the sky darkening until thunder rolled, interrupting her mid-keystroke. Twisting to look out the large windows at her back, Pepper found the sky turning dark and an arc of lightning cutting through the clouds, a harsh contrast to the previously lovely New York day. Turning back to the computer, she brought up a weather widget. It still read sunny and warm, and if she craned her neck just enough, she could see blue sky persevering beyond the clouds. There was no call for storms.

Pepper got to her feet almost at the same time a deafening crack of thunder boomed overhead. Lightning flashed, closer and with more fury this time. She pondered the scene only a moment more, mind working.

Thunder and lightning on an otherwise clear day in an isolated location. According to several eye-witness and written reports, that usually heralded one thing. Pursing her lips and releasing a sigh through her nose, Pepper left the office.


End file.
